The Hacking Story

By the time the guard sat me down in a different side room, a second one, this time with no window at all, Denise had already found a better story than loitering.

"She got into our system somehow," I heard her tell the HR director through the half-open door. "Her visitor profile shouldn't exist. I think she hacked the sign-in kiosk to fake a candidate slot. I want IT to check the front-desk terminal before she goes anywhere."

"Hacked a kiosk," I repeated, mostly to myself.

The guard standing by the door did not look at me the way he had in the hallway. Now there was something more careful in it, the look people give a problem they have been told is dangerous rather than merely inconvenient. Nobody had asked me a single question. Nobody had asked to see anything in my folder.

An HR director I hadn't met yet stuck her head in, took one look at my thrifted blazer and scuffed flats, and apparently decided Denise's version required no further evidence. "We'll get this sorted," she said, to the guard, not to me, and left again.

I thought about the two ways this could go. I could open my folder right now, hand the guard my actual documentation, and end this in the next ninety seconds. Or I could wait until Denise had said enough, in front of enough people, that nobody would be able to explain away what came next as a misunderstanding.

Every minute I waited was a minute Denise spent digging herself somewhere she could not climb back out of. Every minute I waited was also a minute closer to whatever she might do to that requisition file if she got five unsupervised minutes at a keyboard.

"Ma'am, is there someone I can call for you?" the guard asked, not unkindly.

"Yes," I said. "Lillian Ashworth, General Counsel. She already knows my name."

He wrote it down without much conviction, the way people write down things they do not expect to matter.