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said, holding up a powerful, instructive finger, "but more secure."
    "What's that supposed to mean?"
    "Security, Ben, is a feeling. You got your security blanket, your good-luck charm, your friend on the phone saying you're all right when everything around you is goin' to hell. That's what they hired me for."
    "They hired you so that no mad bomber comes in here and blows them all to hell."
    "And I promise you, Ben, nobody is gonna blow up the main offices of Our Bank." Cass smiled and I laughed with him.
    He tore up the blue slip and dropped it on my overflowing trash can.
    From that day on, I signed in every morning at Tina's desk and never felt the slightest bit put out by the absurd security precautions implemented by Cassius Copeland for Our Bank.

    That morning I was a little sluggish, but coming to work soothed my inflamed emotions from the night and day before. Seela would move into her roach-ridden apartment, Mona would heal from the sex she always asked for but never wanted, Barbara Knowland would move on to another banquet, shocking people with her tales of atrocity and recognizing people from her promiscuous past; people who didn't remember her. And I would sit in that tiny, doorless office copying numbers and making notes that were too boring for anyone else to consider.
    When I first came to work at Our Bank, then named New Yorker Savings and Trust, there were sixteen people in my department. I was a lowly entry-level programmer working in COBOL and learning assembly language from an old Irish duffer named Junior. That was way back before PCs and the Internet. We still used information punched into cards and monitors that only had one color—green.
    The systems I maintained were developed in the early sixties. There were hundreds of poorly thought-out, poorly executed, almost completely untested programs that broke down every other week. I learned from fixing logic flaws, bugs, in those programs. I wrote obscure subroutines to make up for the faulty logic rife throughout the data processing systems.
    The work I did was cutting edge back then, twenty-three years ago, but today all my knowledge is archaic, troglodytic. Nowadays people have laptop computers and swap mountains of information across the fiber-optic Internet highway faster than anyone can monitor.
    Over the years, my coworkers died, retired, moved on to different jobs, transferred and learned new systems that came into vogue and then faded away like rap stars and reality-TV celebrities. My department winnowed down and down until only I was left.
    Every year a new systems manager comes in and tells me that he, or she, wants to "migrate the system" to a newer database that will allow more-modem computers and computer systems to take over. But banks are conservative places in spite of their new friendly names. My systems mull over hundreds of millions of dollars every night. My salary is in the very low six figures and I'm the only employee. A new computer system would cost millions. And the glitches and bugs in the transition would also be quite pricey. So all I have to do is have a well-documented job sheet so that if1 drop dead they can hire an expert just like me (for twice the salary) to keep the old programs running well into the twenty-first century.
    I spent the day locating a bug in an old assembler program. It was a branch-and-load-register command that compensated with the wrong command length, found a valid op-code in the data field, and went on its merry way, ignoring all the carefully laid plans of my predecessors.
    I fixed the problem and felt fine. It was a good day and I hadn't spoken a word to anyone. Most of the people on my floor didn't know who I was. The only person I answered to, Brad Richards, worked on the sixty-second floor and rarely bothered with me because I did my job, did not complain, and never asked for a raise.
    When I got home, there was a note left for me on the butcher-block dining table off the kitchen.
    Ben,
    My