Part 1 - The Setup
In the months following Rosa’s reentry into my life, I thought often about her tactic of innocently introducing spanking into a conversation. On the surface, it seemed easy enough, but in practice, it seemed much harder.
Opportunities presented themselves where it occurred to me to say, ‘You need a spanking’, but I couldn’t do it; it didn’t feel right. Was it because I was again too sensitive to a woman’s feelings, that I was afraid it would be taken wrong? Was it fear of being successful and not knowing how to follow up?
After one of these chances passed, I would come up with all kinds of reasons why it might not have been the right person; or the right time. I even wondered whether it worked for Rosa because of some female or maternal slant that made such a statement more palatable or less threatening. My analysis wouldn’t last too long, giving it up by telling myself I shouldn’t over-analyze, which is definitely a character trait of mine.
My role in IT often brings me into situations of frustration, which if I handle myself well, I can turn around to humor or even gratitude. Such was the case one day when dealing with a repetitive issue I was trying to resolve in our Engineering department. A woman named Lina was having trouble with a certain application that didn’t appear to be doing what it was supposed to. It had been affecting her daily for more than a week, where it would refuse to accept her input. She was genuinely nice about it, but every day her frustration grew as we tried unsuccessfully to resolve her problem. Intermittent problems are the worst because you can’t reproduce them on demand and therefore it’s much harder to find a commonality between events. Lina was trying to update a record in this application, and it wasn’t allowing her to save her changes.
It came to a head one morning when she came into my office after several occurrences of the problem had raised her frustration level to new levels.
“Mark! It’s doing it again! Can’t you try something else to fix it? Please?” she pled in her cute voice with a mild Spanish accent.
“I’ll come take a look.”
We headed to her office which normally had two other occupants who were both gone, probably on their coffee break. I sat down at her computer and Lina sat on the corner of the desk watching me. Telling me what she did we went through her process to try again to find the reason. Starting at an earlier step in her procedure, she told me how she found the record she needed to change, and I suddenly knew the reason.
“Lina, you can’t update a closed record!” I said with exasperation. “You’re starting with all closed records here so you can’t update them!” Her mouth dropped open as she realized she was the problem, not the application. Speechless for a few minutes while I elaborated on the reason for her problem and why the application worked that way. “Why are you changing them anyway?”
“Jim has been giving me these project notes to change! I haven’t done that in such a long time, I forgot there’s a separate way to do it! Oh, Mark, I’m so sorry!”
“It’s okay. I’m just glad we figured it out.”
“No, it’s not okay! I’ve been complaining to you since last Tuesday and it was me all along!” she said with the cutest look of contrition on her face.
The word cute would come up often to describe Lina for both her personality, and even more so, her appearance. First, she was very small; petite is a better word. At least an inch or two under five feet tall, but everything very nicely proportioned. A pretty, little face with dark-framed glasses and straight, waist-long dark brown hair. A beautifully proportioned body that would look voluptuous in someone taller, with breasts the size and shape of oranges and a gorgeous, perfectly rounded bottom that I noticed on a very regular basis, because she usually wore tight pants and because I notice girls’ bottoms for obvious reasons.
As the junior person in her department, she is always trying very hard to please and approaches everybody with a great attitude and a cute smile on her pretty face. I’ve seen her interact with various people and invariably they react positively to her as she always has a friendly attitude and will work collaboratively with you.
In my case, I often wondered if she was even friendlier than with others. She seemed to go out of her way, calling to me in the hall for a personal or business reason, where it seemed like a very minor issue, and I wondered if she was just trying to find a reason to talk to me. I didn’t mind as she was such a pleasure to talk to. I’ve mentioned my poor track record in reading girls and their reactions to me in various situations, so I doubted there was anything to it, but still, I wondered. Given the opportunity, I could see myself with her, though our relative sizes might make for an amusing picture.
