The young engineers had left him many hours ago to visit Harry's Bar and battle insomnia and drink brandy and argue over stock prices and joke about the old man's age, but the old man was not angry. It was almost dawn, and he was confident because he had a fresh mug of coffee on his desk and his vision was clear and not blurry as it had been after his optometrist's heart attack during the sudden bear market of October.
He fixed the last of the forty six bugs the testers had reported and ran his long program again by pressing the 'Enter' key with a powerful movement of his painful wrist. As he lifted his hand from the keyboard, he overturned his heavy china mug, and hot coffee ran across his muscular fingers. The brown water burned him, and, as it dried, its coarse grounds made a mark on his knuckles like a scab. But the old man took the suffering from the coffee and his carpal tunnel syndrome as it came. The hands cure quickly he thought.
As he waited for his program's output he tried to ignore the steady hum of the file server's disk drives and the ringing in his ears which he had first heard two years before. He recalled a conversation with the young engineers at a well lighted table inside Harry's.
"What happened in the lawsuit against MegaloSoft today?"
"The lawyers won a great deal."
"And the employees?"
"Nada."
The memory left him, and he could no longer block out the ringing which had begun the night of his twenty seventh birthday when he had dined on cold beer and camarones del diablo. At first he blamed the hot sauce for the ringing and thought that it would fade quickly. But the ringing had not faded and, even though he grew more tired of it every day, he did not mention it to his friends or his manager or anyone in human resources.
"Show yourself like a man, cucaracha!" he shouted as he looked into the depths of his monitor wondering if a bug had stopped his program in the middle.
He sometimes wished he could be a cucaracha himself because cucarachas had hard outer shells and could carry their weight many times over and could survive the radiation from a nuclear blast, but he was a man and glad the cucarachas did not know that the lenses in his glasses were very thick and that he owed his programming skills to insomnia and that he was allergic to dairy products and corn and rhubarb.
Finally the output came and the old man saw that the numbers were good. He renamed the program "GoodNumbers" and stood up and walked to the coffee maker. Then he heard a noise like a dentist's drill cut into the file server's steady hum. He stepped back and pressed the 'Esc' key but his cursor froze. The operating system filled his monitor with "Device Read/Write Error" messages and the old man's head throbbed with pain.
He heard only ringing as the sun rose and he drove in the rain to his
empty apartment where he could forget about the program and the disk drive
crash and he could fight insomnia and drink coffee and also forget about
last year and Catherine and the Pamplona streets and the bulls and the
look on her face when she tripped and fell.