The elevator’s door opens and I step outside.

Finding the “Artificial Imprinting” department is a lot easier than I expected, there’s a huge sign right in front of the elevator. I follow the sign’s instructions and turn right, until I reach a long hallway.

A transparent door stands in front of me.

It looks like an automated door, but it doesn’t open even when I stand a couple of centimeters away from it. The same thing happened earlier this morning, so I can already guess what’s the big deal.

I take out my ID card and pass it by a card reader. After I hear a confirmation sound, the door opens and I stride forth.

“Umm, I was told to meet someone called Eric…”

I call out to the first person I come across.

“Eric? Just continue forward and then turn right, his room is 638.”

“Thanks.”

Luckily, the very first random passerby knows the guy by name. I assume Eric is someone important around here? Maybe the QA team leader?

When the hallway ends, it connects to another hallway and I have the option to turn either left or right. As the man told me, I turn right.

While I walk through the second hallway, I see offices lined up to my right; one of these should be Eric’s office.

To my left, there’s only a wall made of glass. It’s effectively a huge window which showcases the surrounding area. Since this is the 6th floor, the field of view is pretty impressive, though also a little intimidating.

632… 634… 636… 638.

In the middle of the hallway I reach room 638. This hallway seem to only cover rooms with even-numbers, making Eric’s room the fourth in the row.

The door to his office is already open.

“Um, excuse me…”

I timidly knock on the open door and step inside. There’s only one table in the office, yet there are three people flocking around it.

“Okay, so I install the language package and what next?”

“Wait, do these have versions? Also what’s the package’s size?”

“I heard it’s a few terabytes. We‘ll probably need to borrow external storage, right?”

The three workers around the table, two men and one woman, continuously ask questions. The woman is taking notes in a small notebook, whereas the men simply nod as their questions are being answered.

Behind the table sits a man with a tired expression, answering the countless questions thrown at him. He wears a friendly smile, despite clearly being worn out; he must be Eric.

“Umm, excuse me…”

Nobody even notices me standing by the door; the group is too occupied with discussing work-related matters.

Since there’s no rush, I decide to wait until they leave.

The group disperses after roughly 15 minutes.

I understood little of what they were talking about, but at the very least I got the impression that Eric is a veteran in the field.

“Don’t worry, we’ll come nagging soon enough, man!”

One of the leaving men cracks a laugh before walking through the door.

“Please don’t, I need to do some real work sometimes too.”

Eric shrugs with a tired smile.

“Haha.”

The man laughs some more and then disappears.

“Hah…”

Eric sighs, rubs his eyes and then directs his attention toward me.

“Yes, how can I help you?”

“Um, Eric?”

“Yes, that would be me.”

“Hi, I’m Nick. I was told to come to your office”

I walk toward his table as I continue.

“I’ll be working as a QA, supposedly in this department.”

“Nice to meet.”

He smiles and stretches me a hand. I shake his hand and he goes on.

“A QA, huh. Of course, they couldn’t find anybody else but me to show a new guy the ropes. Always gotta be me.”

He sighs and smiles wryly.

“I wonder if they emailed me about this; haven’t opened my inbox for like a week.”

He turns toward his computer and clicks around with his mouse.

“Sit down, it might take a while to load. There are probably at least two hundred new unread emails, haha.”

He makes a sarcastic laugh and points toward the chair standing in front of his table. I accept the offer and sit down.

“As I thought, 234 unread emails from the past week.”

“T-that’s quite the amount…”

“Let’s try searching. You said ‘Nick’, right?”

“Yeah.”

He types on the keyboard and then clicks on his mouse.

“Let’s see………. here’s something.”

He opens an email and starts reading.

“They did sent me an email about this, huh. Fine, let’s get this thing over with.”

He turns toward me and joins his palms in a businesslike manner.

“First, welcome to the company.”

“Thanks.”

“Since the big boss isn’t around right now, I was told to be in charge of you for a while.

But I’ll be honest with you: I don’t have nearly enough free time on my hands to teach you everything. We are in 'crunch time' till the end of the month and I have loads of tasks sitting on me.”

I nod with understanding.

“This is what we’ll do: I’ll arrange the basic tools so you can begin testing. Maybe I’ll also get to teach you a little about the work flow here, when I have the time. Since we are about to release a new version fairly soon, at this point a newbie QA can’t be expected to have a great impact; no offense.”

“No, I understand.”

If a version of a product is about to be released, then it must have been already tested a lot by more experienced QA testers. Even if a clueless newbie like me starts testing at this late point, it’s unlikely I’ll find critical bugs.

“With that being the case, you’ll be somewhat of a ‘freeloader’ for a while.”

“A freeloader…?”

“Yes, just take your time to slowly get accustomed to doing QA here. Did you work in the field before?”

“Yeah, for about two years. I was testing automated kiosks for a startup company.”

“That’s not a bad start. Just a sec, I’ll make a call and then I’ll show you the QA office.”

Eric scans the list of phone numbers hanging on a board and types digits on a telephone. He puts the call on speaker and doesn’t lift the handset.

“Hello, Eric darling~”

A flirtatious voice comes from the other side. But it’s… a guy’s voice, isn’t it?

“Heh, what’s up, Lou.”

Eric throws a small laugh as he rubs his eyes.

“What can I help you with, my sweet?”

“Heh, do you have an unused model for testing? We got a new guy in the department, as a QA.”

Eric continues to crack laughs as he speaks.

“Hmm, we do have two which are turned off. Though, one of them is used for static testing, like internet connection and automatic updates.”

The guy’s voice stops being playful and he sounds... normal. I can only assume that his flirtatious voice was some sort of casual joke.

“Could you arrange for one model to be delivered to room 635? With the right configurations for testing, of course.”

“Okie dokie, darling!”

The guy answers in a playful manner again. Eric doesn’t seem to bothered by it, he only laughs whenever the guy talks in that silly manner.

“Speaking of which, dear. We have been testing these automatic updates of your imprinting… do you know that it corrupts the data unless we do a cleanup first? We had to reformat the whole thing from scratch!”

“Yes, there’s a bug open about it in the server too. But give up, it’s not going to be fixed for this version.”

“WHAT!?”

The guy shouts, producing an unpleasant pitch voice. Eric immediately cuts him off by picking up the telephone's handset and dropping it down.

“A funny guy, isn’t he?”

“Ah, yeah… quite.”

I give him an awkward smile, not sure what else I can say...

Eric stands up and circles around his table; I also instinctively stand up.

“Bugs?”

I ask as I follow Eric to the door.

“Yes. This one in particular gives me a headache, everybody come crying to me. But it won’t be fixed for this version, so I just ignore them.”

Eric speaks with an expression of relief on his face.

“I’ll show you where your office will be.”

“Okay.”

I obediently follow the veteran. We exit his room and walk toward the direction from which I came.

Not much was clear to me from that phone conversation, but I’m pretty sure about one thing: Eric isn’t a QA tester.

A QA finds bugs, but he doesn’t fix them.

If people expect him to fix bugs in the product, then he must be a developer; probably a programmer, based on how his office looks.

This begs the question: why is he showing me the ropes? Shouldn’t someone from the QA team do that? The QA team leader might be busy or such, but surely there are others who could fill that role.

“Say.”

“Yes?”

“You aren’t a QA, are you?”

“No, I’m a programmer. Why?”

“Then… why did they ask you to be in charge of me? Shouldn’t that be the work of the QA team leader?”

“QA team leader, heh.”

Eric throws me a smile, as if I said something funny.

“If you want there to be a leader for our QA team, then you are free to claim the title.”

“… sorry?”

“You are the QA team, pal. The whole of it.”

“… huh?”

“We don’t have a QA team in our department. Or rather, DIDN’T have one until now.”

That’s…

I…

Eh…

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?