Saturday, March 21, 2015

Sudden Short Story 72

"Hey.  I suppose that you heard the speech last night," said Joe as he entered the department Monday morning. 
"Yeah," replied Mary.  "The whole office is uneasy.  Everyone's got that suspicion that anyone else could be from the other dimension."
"I don't think that we have too much to fear, here," said Joe.  "We're not the military or the FBI or anything.  Where's Dan?"
"He called in sick." 
"What a first day back, eh?  Well, how'd the consultant do, anyway?"  The consultant's last day had been Friday. 
"He did pretty well, actually.  He said that he could improve data fidelity with another layer of normalization.  He said that he even got some of the tables into Codd-Boyce Normal Form." 
"You mean Boyce-Codd Normal Form," Joe said, as he sipped his morning coffee. 
"Well, DBA's not really my thing, but I'm sure that he said Codd-Boyce Normal Form, or sometimes CBNF." 
Joe slammed his coffee onto Mary's desk and ran to his cubicle.  "How sure are you?" he asked, as his fingers flew across his keyboard. 
"Quite sure," Mary said.  The printer started running. 
"Call Nick.  Tell him to cut our internet, have his team start turning off machines and unplugging them from the network, and put every pre-Roger backup tape in a vault somewhere."  Joe grabbed the printed page and ran out.  "I've got to talk to the president - and the president." 
Mary sat down, wondering what to make of Joe's ramblings, when an e-mail appeared in her inbox, from Joe.  It had no subject, and the body was just a link, to Wikipedia's article on Boyce-Codd normal form.  

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