WOW Online Request

Clayton introduced me to the HQ group as the latest member of the security team at the satellite tracking station. Then he added, in his own words, “She also plays World of Warcraft.”

Oh No! He mentioned WOW. He doesn’t know what he just did!

I slumped down in my chair and tried to hide behind the guy in front of me but realized we were on a video conference call, and I could easily be identified at any time.

Half of the HQ group on screen moaned, “Ohhhh…” The other half nodded and grinned at the camera. To me, it was a mixture of horror and approval. One of the engineers in the room, a 30-ish Asian woman, looked at me and said, “I want to talk to you after…”

Oh, damn! She’s the principal engineer. I’m in trouble now!

I had been hired to work for Sandy, the Security Manager, and had a government clearance. Part of getting that clearance was to list all your online accounts. Luckily, my clearance from another company was transferred to this operation before the requirement was initiated. Until now nobody knew I played WOW.

Recently, we had a security briefing about some people being caught passing secrets between the characters they used in online games. Sometimes they would create a low-level character (cartoon) just for the purpose of passing information to another player. It would be created by someone who knew when and where to find their target character online in the game, pass on information to the target, and would delete the toon before anyone noticed what had happened.

This was possible to do quickly and easily and was demonstrated by the man giving the security briefing. He happened to use a Human Hunter toon to demonstrate the character passing another character on a road and whispering a message as he ran past and then disappeared. This had gotten my attention because one of my toons was a Human Hunter.

After the HQ meeting, Tammy stopped me in the hall and asked me to come to her office. I schlepped down the hall, looking at the floor and sat in a chair facing her desk, wondering if I was in trouble for playing WOW. She wrote something on a sticky note and handed it to me.

“Here. Put this in your purse. Don’t show it to anyone. Be online at 9pm.”

I glanced down at the sticky on which was written:

Ttiger United States Earthen Ring Alliance Stormwind City

This is her name, locale and realm, side choice (Alliance or Horde), and specific location in WOW! I hope its legit and not a trick. I can’t lose my job over this.

I hesitated, thought about it, and even though I didn’t want to play, decided I was curious, so I ended up giving her my WOW info.

After all, I work with her now. She can be trusted, right?

I logged into WOW at 9pm and searched for Ttiger. She wasn’t hard to find in Stormwind. She was standing outside the Auction House. Her character waved. Ofie (me) waved back. She messaged me in-game.

T: “I’m glad to see you. Now I have someone to play with. I didn’t think Ofie was you. Most people create toons that look similar to themselves, but you look, uh, different.”

Me: “Right. I didn’t think adding gray hair and wrinkles to my toon would get me the respect I deserve. So, I created a young female Beast-Mastery Hunter with dark skin and long black hair. I also have male toons who are Paladins and such. They’re good fighters. I’ve been playing 15 years and am pretty adept at it. I still get flirted with by the young players. It’s funny.”

T: “Totally understand.”

Me: “Sometimes I feel like telling them how old I am just to see what they do.”

T: “You like raids or maybe dungeons?”

Me: “Don’t like raids. Too confusing with too many toons.”

T: “Dungeons maybe? I enter them sometimes with guys from the sandbox. It’s always early a.m. because of the time difference.”

Me: “I’m not that good anymore. Besides, the sandbox guys are trained in fighting, and I’m just a casual player.”

T: “They don’t care. Sometimes they only need an extra player so they can enter a dungeon.”

Me: “But I don’t know how to run through most of the new dungeons or who the Boss is. I’ve done a little of that in the past, but I’m not as good as they are.”

T: “Doesn’t matter. They’ll have you stand in one spot, and then they do all the work. After they kill the Boss, they give you some gear or something just for being there. I’ll set up a dungeon for you.”

Me: “You know them?”

T: “No. But my husband has contacts over there. Give it a try!”

Me: “Okay. You been doing this long?”

T: “Yeah, three years.”

There was a pause, then Ttiger left, and in a few minutes, she appeared in a different spot in an alley next to the Bank. Ofie ran over to her. Tammy continued to message me via my toon.

T: “So, what did you think of the meeting today?”

Me: “No talk shop.”

T: “See you at work tomorrow then.”

Me: “See ya…”

Ofie waved at Ttiger, and I logged off.

That was interesting. It’s late and I’m really tired, but I think it was good for me to connect with Tammy. I will have to work with her for a long time, and I want to start out with a good relationship. I’m going to have to contact her for documentation information in the future, so it’s in my best interest to play online with her… I think.

The next morning Sandy called me into her office. “Have a seat. We need to talk.”

“Okay.”

“I have an assignment for you. It involves finding out who might be using one of the computers in this building for playing games. We suspect it’s someone on the Ops floor who is using a computer in your office downstairs at night. We don’t think it’s you or any of your officemates.”

Whew!

“By the way, you passed your first test. You refused to ‘talk shop’ with Tammy. Congratulations.”