Tuesday, October 14, 2003
First of all, a call for phone numbers. I lost my mobile the other day (well it was nicked actually) and I don't think I was conscientious enough to have them all written down. So if you're reading this and you live in Glasgow or Edinburgh please email me your mobile number so that we can like, hook up. Man from Toward don't worry, I know where to find you on the 1st.
Today we got a typically last-minute call to appear at a meeting with some Important Men in Finance who want to see how we are spending their money. We rushed home to suit up smart, then Luiz gave his presentation again, by now well-polished, and I was the engineer in the corner to field techie questions. I even put a couple of ballpoints in my shirt pocket (joke). In fact we were more there to show that the operation is serious rather than to actually talk. The one question that was in my area was deftly-fielded by Darth Vader, who managed to put his own spin on it.
It was a very impressive effort as the question at first sight hardly appeared spinnable. Plus, to be fair, since the questioners much preferred English and I am the only native speaker in the place, I would have wiped the floor with him had he let me get a word in. Since Darth's English is only fair-to-ropey I suspected he realised the danger and thus moved to head me off at the pass. Luckily I had brought my laptop so all the time was not was wasted, I spent a pleasant hour putting the finishing touches to a technical manual while the Powerpoint flashed on the wall above my head.
Tomorrow afternoon some of the checker-uppers will be passing by the office to look around, so I will make sure that the place is a hive of brainstorming sessions, beeping servers and most of all little groups of people leaning over monitors to point at the screen in professional harmony, two 'looking on' as the third points to something really important on the screen. These are the kind that any IT recruitment brochure ever has on the cover, but in fact they are hokum, if you have 5 developers hunched round the same computer it normally means something has gone tits up.
Today we got a typically last-minute call to appear at a meeting with some Important Men in Finance who want to see how we are spending their money. We rushed home to suit up smart, then Luiz gave his presentation again, by now well-polished, and I was the engineer in the corner to field techie questions. I even put a couple of ballpoints in my shirt pocket (joke). In fact we were more there to show that the operation is serious rather than to actually talk. The one question that was in my area was deftly-fielded by Darth Vader, who managed to put his own spin on it.
It was a very impressive effort as the question at first sight hardly appeared spinnable. Plus, to be fair, since the questioners much preferred English and I am the only native speaker in the place, I would have wiped the floor with him had he let me get a word in. Since Darth's English is only fair-to-ropey I suspected he realised the danger and thus moved to head me off at the pass. Luckily I had brought my laptop so all the time was not was wasted, I spent a pleasant hour putting the finishing touches to a technical manual while the Powerpoint flashed on the wall above my head.
Tomorrow afternoon some of the checker-uppers will be passing by the office to look around, so I will make sure that the place is a hive of brainstorming sessions, beeping servers and most of all little groups of people leaning over monitors to point at the screen in professional harmony, two 'looking on' as the third points to something really important on the screen. These are the kind that any IT recruitment brochure ever has on the cover, but in fact they are hokum, if you have 5 developers hunched round the same computer it normally means something has gone tits up.
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