"We, ah, just wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings, Carl," said Roger. "I know it's not much, but we've all been—"

"No, this is a nice gesture," Carl interrupted, looking down at the small cake on one of Roger's desks which read "We ♡ IT". "I know how busy you've all been, and I really appreciate that you put in the time."

"I wanted the rest of the PMs to be here—they were around earlier—but I think almost everybody crashed as soon as we started the final patch upload," Roger said in apologetic tone.

"We usually sorta have department-wide nap time," said Sarah Minton, the Project Manager for the physics engine, who Carl had just met and who also appeared to just barely be staying awake. Her eyes drifted shut again before snapping open. "Um, yeah. Sorry, Carl, it's been nice meeting you, but I…" she yawned again and slowly drifted away from Roger's cube, yawning continuously as she swayed back and forth.

Roger took a long pull from his mug. "She doesn't drink coffee."

"I don't know how she does it," said Guang Lau, one of two Project Managers for the game's terrain and environment. He took a swig from his own mug, which was nearly as large as Roger's but not quite. "She was here with us overnight trying to properly fix that ocean vortex bug. Ended up being a comb…" he yawned, then took a long blink. "A…" He yawned again, more powerfully this time. "Oh man, I think it's catching up to me."

"Get some rest," Roger said, now flicking through something on a tablet. "No early issues reported, and the update is streaming fine from these metrics I'm seeing."

Guang took another long blink. "Yeah, I…" He blinked again, then shook his head. "I think I'm gonna just head home. Haven't seen Thanh and the boys since last week; I'm sure she's going crazy trying to deal with them."

"Get Shawn out of here too," Roger said, gesturing to the Project Manager for monster and boss enemy implementation, who was currently asleep and leaning against the wall of Roger's cubicle with his head tipped back, snoring softly. "I don't think he's left the office at all in the past week." He drank from his mug.

Carl sipped his coffee, freshly refilled from the good coffee in the fifth floor break room.

"Yeah, he's really been busting his ass," Guang said after stifling another yawn. He held his hand out and looked up at Carl. "Nice meeting you, Carl, sorry we've been a little unfriendly."

Carl grasped the offered hand and presented a measured smile as he gave it a single, firm shake. "Nice meeting you, too, Guang, but don't worry about it. Everybody makes mistakes."

Guang gave a nod with a friendly, sleepy smile before he turned to the sleeping man next to him. "Alright, Shawn, c'mon," he said, shaking his shoulder.

Roger tapped his tablet with his mug, again somehow managing to simultaneously drink from it.

Shawn Price, the youngest of the group and the one who had faded out of the extremely brief meeting almost as soon as it began, groaned.

Carl sipped his coffee.

"We're on low power the rest of the week," Roger said, "so take care of yourselves."

Shawn gave a lazy salute, the gravitas of which was further undermined by the manner in which he squinted to prevent nearly any light from reaching his eyes. He leaned on the slightly shorter Guang as they staggered away, heading towards the elevators.

"You work like this for every patch?" Carl asked, staring after the duo of Project Managers who were slowly walking through the now-inert Engineering department. Over the top of the short cubicle wall, he could see more than a dozen people asleep at their desks: some used their arms as pillows, some had fallen asleep on top of their keyboards, others had small airline pillows, and there was even one younger employee with long hair who appeared to have a full-sized body pillow with the company's flame logo tiled on it.

"Usually," Roger said, taking an even longer drink from his mug before he set it on his nearest desk to indicate that it was empty.

Carl, being the courteous coffee-drinker that he was, finished his own mug and set it down so that—

Roger picked up his mug and looked up from his tablet. "Refill?"

"Sure," Carl said, lifting his own mug once more as he'd expected to.

Roger seemed somehow energized by the deployment of the expansion, or perhaps it was the successful completion of the last-minute bug fix patch that the team had worked on until literally the last possible minute. "Sometimes it's worse than others. We unlocked a new continent this time—the one you've been playing on—and there's been all kinds of unexpected issues."

They started walking towards the elevators where the break room was also located.

"There's all these islands around it, so it's the first time we opened up real sea travel," Roger continued, "which meant we had to actually pay attention to stuff like getting ocean tides right and making sure all the underwater terrain and creatures were generated properly instead of just being random nonsense designed to immediately kill players when they wandered out too far…"

"That vortex thing sounded pretty serious," Carl actively listened.

Roger sighed. "I don't even know how it started. We were trying to figure out how to make realistic underwater volcanoes for something Greg and Linda wanted, then we had to get the resulting currents right with the temperature changes, and Sarah's team was going crazy obsessing over it, and then the whole thing spiraled out of control when we discovered the moons weren't having exactly the right effect with the gravity values we put in…" He turned the corner into the empty break room and made right for the coffee machine, placing his mug under it.

The machine immediately began dispensing the stamina-restoring liquid, and it was at that moment that Carl really appreciated why the first call that Engineering had made to him when he'd started had been to try getting the coffee machine reconnected to the network.

As was specified by Director-level Coffee Protocol, Roger waited until Carl had refilled his mug before taking his first drink.

"Good coffee," Carl commented.

Roger grunted his agreement. "I talked to Seb this morning. He's working on getting your department switched back to the old coffee."

The mention of someone Carl didn't know caused him to stop with his mug nearly at his mouth. "Who?"

Roger produced a tablet from one of his pockets and tapped on it a few times before holding it up for Carl to see. "Sebastian's the office manager from Workplace Resources. He handles stocking all the break rooms."

"Oh." Carl stared at the photo from the company directory on the tablet, seeing a slightly-smiling middle-aged man he'd never met before.

Roger stuffed the tablet back into his coat pocket while taking another gulp from his mug. "Yeah, he's a little…shy. Great guy, though." He started off back towards the office floor, his voice dropping in volume. "The coffee your department is drinking is the new stuff."

Carl followed after, taking a curious sip of his coffee as he fell into place next to the shorter man who seemed like he was carrying way too freaking many company devices.

"Someone in HR read a study about coffee a couple years ago and started trying to phase out what we'd been drinking in favor of one of those new synthetic coffee bean extract things—"

"Ugh," Carl said, at last realizing why he'd had such an immediate and visceral dislike of the coffee in his department. Things in the current year were pretty cool, but some of the synthetic, lab-grown food replacements hadn't quite caught up to the originals they were marketed as substitutes for.

"Yup. Supposed to have more caffeine or whatever," Roger waved his hand in the air dismissively, "but—"

"It's not about the caffeine," Carl said.

That was just a fact. And anyone who argued it—

"It's the flavor," Roger finished, nodding his agreement as they reached his cube again. "I think you might be one of the only other people here who gets that. Everyone else is always putting sugar in by the truckload—"

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Gotta be able to appreciate the natural flavor," Carl asserted.

Roger nodded vehemently. "Exactly."

"Can't go dumping condiments into coffee," Carl said, taking a sip.

Roger finished his gulp. "When you say it like that, I'm imagining ketchup and mustard. I bet there's at least one coffeehouse in the city that has something like that on the menu."

Carl grimaced. The mention of coffeehouses brought back unpleasant memories. "Disgusting."

"I'll say."

The mail indicator on Carl's glasses lit up, and he groaned inwardly.

His hand reached into his pocket for his phone, and he thumbed his way into the mail, which was from Gab—because of course it was—and contained a calendar invite to lunch the following day at 12:30 to discuss his network performance analyses along with a quick note that she'd be in meetings the rest of the day and in the morning.

This was, in Carl's estimation, not an ideal situation.

"That, ah, Gab?" Roger asked, resting his mug in both hands as he lounged against one of his desks.

Carl did not sigh.

Sighing at this time would have been very unprofessional.

Carl un-grimaced. "Yeah, lunch meeting to talk about a new project." He took an annoyed gulp of coffee.

"Not looking forward to it?" Roger sipped his coffee sympathetically.

"It's not the most exciting project I've worked on."

"Reminds me of when we were iterating on our lockstep protocol in the early days," Roger said, grimacing slightly. "Glad we did it, but there's few things more mind-numbing than asking someone on the other side of the country to turn around as fast as they can and then wait to see if they start vomiting from motion sickness caused by lag."

Carl sipped from his mug as he considered the scenario.

Roger took a drink. "I'm heading out for the day," he announced. "I'll walk you back to your floor on my way out." He started emptying his pockets onto one of his desks—the one which looked less like a disaster zone filled with a seemingly random assortment of electronics and curved computer monitors—pulling out three tablets and a folding laptop and stowing them into one of the drawers in his filing cabinet.

Carl frowned. He took a pensive sip of his coffee.

Roger nodded his head towards the elevator, so Carl picked up the box with the cake and followed after him.

The reached the elevators after once more passing through the graveyard-like silence of the Engineering department, stopping only when Roger leaned down to pick a blanket up off the floor and throw it over a young-looking man who was in the process of sleeping with the side of his face pressed to the top of his keyboard.

"I figured you were a bit more…" Carl paused, making sure he phrased his statement properly while they waited for the elevator. "Hands-on? I mean, I didn't expect you to be leaving until everyone else was gone."

Roger chuckled after taking a sip of coffee. "You mean you thought I was micromanaging?"

"Well…"

"I've got almost twenty PMs under me, Carl." The elevator opened and they stepped in, with Roger being the one to press the button for the second floor. "They've all got their own methodologies and styles, but I'm the one responsible for herding them into working together to ship our product. Some of them, like Sarah, are perfectionists—every issue needs to be solved Properly—while others, like Guang, are more pragmatic and willing to cut a couple corners—or even all the corners if need be—in order to ensure that we ship on time. Nowadays I'm just the mediator who balances all that out."

Carl took a pensive sip of his coffee. He'd always assumed that Roger had been far more direct in his management, perhaps even writing large portions of code, but it seemed that this wasn't really the case. "And they're okay with that?"

Roger took another drink. "Most of them came up through the ranks at this point," he said, a faraway look in his eye. "The ones that I hired into their roles, I gave them a short-term, stupid, unimportant task to manage right after they started." The elevator doors opened, and the Directors of Engineering and IT stepped out, heading back towards Carl's office. "We've got that three month trial period in the new hire contracts for a reason," he continued. "I got rid of the ones who couldn't deal with it, and everyone who passed fits right in."

Carl frowned. "Seems a bit dishonest."

Roger took a pull from his coffee. "Not what I expected to hear from the guy who's called up our CTO twice in the past year to try swindling him out of personal details."

"Hey, that's different," Carl said defensively. He waved to Dax, whose cornrow-covered head was poking out of Brett's Halloween-decorated cube, as they reached the open door which had "Director of IT" on its nameplate. "All the C-levels are pretty easy to reach externally given how they hand out business cards at events, so it's important that they—"

"I understand why you do it," Roger interrupted, "but it's still the same sort of thing, isn't it?"

Carl took a moment to consider the question while he set the cake on top of his desk—naturally he'd take it around the department in a little while to make sure his team got to enjoy slices, though this was solely for the purpose of building team morale and not because he wasn't interested in getting back to work on his current project—and then leaned against the edge of it, supplementing his thinking with a sip of coffee.

"Hm." It did seem a little bit similar, he'd admit. In one case, however, he was probing potential security holes in the company based on an actual policy, and in the other, Roger was ensuring… He was kinda ensuring that his new hires were adhering to departmental policy, now that Carl thought about it? He frowned into another sip of coffee. "Okay, maybe you're right," he allowed, continuing to frown as he tried to figure out why…

Roger tapped a finger to his head. "Have to think way outside the box sometimes to get the best out of your teams."

Carl wasn't sure he agreed with that, but the scale of what Roger was managing was vastly different than his own department, so he decided not to dismiss it out of hand.

The Director of Engineering's eyes unfocused for a moment. "Ah, before I forget," he said, his expression turning to a slight frown. "I noticed some unusual database access last time I checked."

"Well…"

"You know that's still a production database, right, Carl?" Roger asked, giving Carl a vaguely disappointed look over his glasses.

"Isn't it just for the beta server?" Carl asked, suddenly feeling like maybe triple-checking his commands hadn't quite been sufficient.

Roger sighed and shook his head. "No, anything that's accessible outside the office is all in the same database."

"Oh."

"And while I'm sure you're being very careful," Roger continued, "anyone can make mistakes."

Carl shifted on his desk and took an uncomfortable sip of his coffee. "Yeah, that's… That's true…"

Roger took a couple steps into the room and dropped his voice. "Look, I get that it's the beta server, and you're just logging in to chill out a bit during lunch, but let's not risk having to do a full database restore so you can go fishing with a boss weapon."

That…seemed like a totally reasonable request to Carl, who felt like he'd acted very unlike himself on this matter, both in not knowing that he'd been accessing the global game database and in thinking that a mere triple-check would have been acceptable when modifying something in production. He'd just been so stressed lately! It had seemed perfectly reasonable to do a little modifying here and there, maybe a little bit over—

"I'll send you the docs for the dev console," Roger said. "Let's try to avoid messing with any of the databases in the future, alright?" He drank expectantly from his mug.

"Yeah…" Carl took an apologetic sip of his coffee. "Sorry, Roger, that was really unprofessional of me."

Roger looked at him for another moment, then took an approving gulp of his coffee. "Glad we're on the same page. I don't want to make a big deal out of it, so we'll end it there."

Carl hadn't been reprimanded in many years. This wasn't quite a reprimand, he knew, since that wouldn't be very appropriate between fellow department heads, but it had the same feeling to him even though Roger was taking some care to be polite about it.

In short, Carl was embarrassed. Not like, really embarrassed or anything, because it was a pretty harmless screw-up when considering the bigger picture given that there had been no actual screw-ups, but he was still pretty embarrassed now that he considered that he, Carl "Low-Risk" Weathers, had actively been running updates and queries against a database which was in constant use by however many hundreds of millions of end users.

Some of those updates had been important, sure. He'd done a few good deeds here and there. On the whole, however, most of the changes he'd made were not good deeds and had actually been for the sole purpose of furthering his own enjoyment, which wasn't something he was proud of.

At that moment, Carl made a decision. "You know, thanks, Roger," he said, making eye contact and abstaining from coffee for the time being. "I'm glad we had this talk now instead of after I made a mistake."

Roger paused, an expression of surprise flitting across his face. Then he grinned. "Me too, Carl." He took a commemorative drink of coffee that the larger man mirrored. "We should chat like this more often."

Carl grinned back, feeling some relief that there had been no gloating involved when he decided to make a more sincere acknowledgment of his mistake. "My door's always open."

Roger smirked. "I don't even have a door."