Suze Appleton

Matt arrived at the building first on Friday, but then he was used to that. His need for being punctual outweighed any need for extra sleep, and just in case the bus let him down he always got the earlier bus. He grabbed a drink from the vending machine in the hallway and wandered through to the empty training room where the IT guy, was working at the back of one of the computer monitors. Drew looked up when he saw Matt enter and gave him a broad smile. They had already struck up a kind of friendship through their shared interest in computers. On his first day there Matt had helped Drew get all the machines set up in time for the group after a glitch had frozen the system.

Matt was happy to see Drew too, having found out that he shared his love of gaming. Drew had joined Matt's online gaming group. He was rapidly creeping up the rankings and giving Aardvark, Matt's main rival, some trouble. Matt reckoned Drew spent nearly as much time on the games as he did.  

Matt wandered over to his chair and dumped his bag over the back.

'Hi, Drew,' he called, 'another one giving you trouble?'

'Couldn't you sleep again? Honestly you're giving the place a bad name being so keen to get here every day,' retorted Drew, as he continued to wrestle with the back of a monitor.

'Yeah, well I still managed to beat your ass this morning before I left,' Matt fired back. 'I got you locked in the Tower of Doom without any weapons.'

'Oh, you think so do you? Well, I still have the Cloak of Invisibility so don't bank on it, kid,' replied Drew, looking up.

He shot an imaginary pistol over the bank of screens towards Matt, who ducked and scrambled to the end of the row before jumping up and fire back at him, making 'peeow' sounds, just as he had as a small child. After rolling on the floor playing dead, Drew stood up laughing as they exchanged bravado about the game they were both involved in. Drew was just waving his hands in the hair, describing the explosion he was going to cause, as Jo came through the doorway.

'Play nicely boys,' she smirked.

With a low tolerance for most people, she reserved a special disdain for men who acted like boys. There was clearly only one person she deemed worthy of her attention but Marilyn didn't seem to have understood the meaning of the overt touching and flattering. Marilyn spoke so admiring of John it was clear she still had hopes of him tiring of his leggy young models and saw herself as the warm arms he would come back to when he realised the error of his ways.

As Jo moved to the front of the room to deposit the box of DVDs she was carrying, Drew and Matt launched into a chat about megabytes and CPUs that had more innuendo behind it than technology.

'So, how many megabytes does the female CPU have capacity for, D'you reckon?' Matt winked at Drew while Jo's back was turned.

'Not many, I shouldn't think,' replied Drew. 'The resistors are high and capacity low so the couplings need to be changed to allow greater tolerance. The male-female won't work so we'll have to go for the female-female type.'

As they both dissolved into a fit of giggles Jo turned round to look at them.

'Oh go back to nursery boys,' she snapped, 'before you get yourselves into something you can't handle, if you know what I mean?'

She gave them both a glare and Drew hid behind the monitor he'd been working on as Matt sloped back to his desk. With his back to Jo, Drew looked at Matt and gave him a grin. Matt acknowledged it with a nod and bent to hide behind his monitor, a smirk still on his face. Drew finished what he was doing and left as the rest of the trainees slumped into the room.
To be continued shortly...