Chapter 4 - Folly Beach County Park

Sprawling over a 92 acres of land in Folly Island, U-soft was considered the ideal company to work for.
Its east entrance faced the East Ashley Avenue which ran along the shore of Atlantic.
Charmaine rushed to her building after the security check. She was already 5 minutes late for her meeting with Lucia Mabel, her replacement on U-shop application. Charmaine was supposed to give her a transition today.

"Sorry, I am late" Charmaine holding a small black file entered with all apologies.
Lucia stood and offered her hands with a smile 'No problem, Am Lucia Mabel'
"Charmaine White" Charmaine shook her hands.

"So, you are the unlucky girl who is going to support this U-Shop application" Charmaine pulled a chair for herself facing Lucia.
"You scaring me, is it complex?"
Charmaine took out the data model and the application design document from her file.
"Umm...Could have been simpler, but poorly designed and implemented by an amateur some 5 years back" she gave a copy of her documents to Lucia.
The first document was titled the "Design of U-shop application". And below the title in smaller font read "Designed and implemented by Charmaine White"

"It was 12 years back. American International Bank(AIB) had just started its operations. AIB took the pride in becoming the first bank that supported anonymous banking with its new concept of using dynamic fake 25 digit account numbers.
It had its initial hiccups in getting its customers.
Biggest Challenge being, getting the customer's trust on this new banking approach.
Media reported that the BA project may be scraped forever.
Investigation agencies, argued that this banking approach made it almost impossible for them to track any criminal's transactions.
People guessed AIB might be closed and the BA project scraped forever.

Even if the customer had some trust in this banking approach, many other companys that had to deal with banks did not support transactions with AIB. That is because these companies would have to invest a lot in changing their system to support transactions with AIB, which they believed will not live long.
So, AIB wasn't the first choice for bank customers.

However, our company, U-soft believed this banking approach will live and foresaw a huge market potential if it implemented an online portal that would support transactions with AIB or any other similar banks that might come up in the near future. So, U-soft invested for the U-shop, an e-marketing portal that would handle transactions from AIB along with regular banks.. That is when I was hired in this company" Charmaine opened her water bottle and had a gulp. "Things have changed a lot since the launch of this application. Over a period of time, AIB's customer base drastically increased. So did the U-Shop's customer base. AIB reports almost 10% of Americans are AIB customers. And we believe 25% of Americans are U-shop customers. And remember all this drastic change in a period of 5 years."

Lucia was thrilled to hear this history and was taking notes Charmaine went on with her transition.


"So Charmaine, if some one has to use the U-shop application, do they have to be a registered user?"
"Ofcourse, yes"
"So, while registering a user in U-shop, would we be collecting his contact details"
"It is only optional at registration"
"But it is required while making a transaction?"
"It depends on the type of transaction he is dealing with us. If he needs the product delivered at his house, yes we will need his address. If he prefers the product be delivered in one of our retail outlets, we may not ask for his address"

Lucia thought for a while and asked "So, if the AIB customer is using a transaction that requires his billing address, he is no longer anonymous, right?"

"The word anonymous, means a bit different in this context. It is supposed to mean that you can not track a customer's activities with just one transaction he makes with you. It is to be remembered that, whatever AIB customer shares with us is only a fake account number which he can change soon after the transaction."

"Vaaw, that's interesting.." Lucia wondered.
"Yeah, it is"



Charmaine walked over to Mike's office for lunch. Mike wasn't there. Looked like he didn't come to office today.

"Hon, what's up?" Charmaine called Mike on her cell phone.
"Guess, you made the right decision sleeping in the car last night. I couldn't wake up in the morning" Mike spoke in a sleepy voice.
"That explains for the morning. How about now, you still sound sleepy and it is afternoon"
"I am taking the day off, need some rest. See you in the evening at the beach park"

For the past 3 years, Mike and Charmaine have been spending the weekday evenings in the Folly Beach county park.
Charmaine's apartment was a 5 minute walk from the Folly beach county park. Mike's is a bit farther. So, in the evenings, he always drove to Charmaine's apartment and from there they both preferred walking to the county beach.

The park is beautifully surrounded by sea on three sides. Mike and Carmines always preferred the eastern side of the park where tidal forces are a bit stronger than the western side.
They sat side by side on a small rocky surface near the shore.

"How did your day at home go?" Charmaine put her arm around Mike's shoulders.
"Great! How was work today"
"Well, all day training for Lucia. She shows great interest in this application and learns fast."
"Good for you. You could start concentrating on your new project soon"

They both admired the beauty of the tides for hours. Silence filled in as they both drowned in deep thoughts. Charmaine and Mike traversed the sea of space and time and unraveled the mysteries of the distant stars.

The silence of the beautiful evening was broken when Mike's pager beeped. Charmaine and Mike always turned off their cellphones when they are in the county park not to let anyone spoil their evenings.

Mike checked out the number displayed. Though he didn't instantly recognize the entire number displayed, he did realize the area code part of it. How can he forget this area code. He had spent all his school days there. Yes, it was Hillsville area code. Mike switched on his cell phone and checked the number displayed in the pager.
James Miller. His best friend. James usually wouldn't call him in the evenings as he knew that Mike and Charmaine spent their evenings in county beach. If he is trying to reach now, it got to be important.
"It is James" Mike looked at Charmaine.
Charmaine stood up "Call him, we will start home. You can speak as we walk."