Familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt. I know that the software system I spend most of my time working on is an appalling lash-up, a Heath Robinson contraption involving ASP pages, Delphi and Visual Basic components, and the odd Perl script thrown in just to be annoying. I know I spend half my time fixing it when it breaks, and two-thirds of my time implementing special requests and exception cases that will probably break it again. (Yes, it does take up 116.666667% of my time, if you were thinking of checking my figures.)
But, because I spend all this time and effort on it, it does keep working. And it has measurable results - measurable benefits, in fact. So people who have no clue what it does or how it works (i.e. management here at SyphiliticDonkeyRaping Systems) keep putting it up for industry awards. And the weird thing is, it wins.
So … last Thursday, the system was up for an award again. And management had a thought, or at least something that passes for a thought at management level. “Hmm,” they thought, “Steve has been looking down in the dumps lately. Shall we do something to improve his mood, like giving him a pay raise in line with the cost of living? No, that would be a dangerous break with tradition - let’s send him to the awards ceremony instead, that’ll be a treat for him.”
These awards do’s are a treat for management, you see. They go to the best hotels, eat and drink immoderately, and network. Hmm, I said to myself, I think my workaday programmer’s uniform (old polo shirt, very old casual trousers, and sweater from the late Palaeolithic era) may not be up to the standards required at such an event. Perhaps my good suit, specially constructed for the purposes of That Wedding in Taunton, might meet the case … No, I was informed, the awards dinner will be a black tie affair, at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane.
So one Saturday morning saw me shambling down to the Plain in Oxford, where there is a formal-wear hire shop. “Good morning,” I said to the woman behind the counter, “do you enjoy a challenge? I need to hire a dinner suit.” She blanched, made the sign of the cross, and turned me over to their Oddities and Teratology department, who eventually found something that fitted. I would say that, in a dinner suit, I look like Orson Welles, but it isn’t true. Normally, I look like three hundredweight of camel droppings; in a dinner suit, I look like three hundredweight of camel droppings in a dinner suit.
These things are mostly management events, but, for this particular one, there happened to be a dearth of managers available. Of the four layers of management above me (this in a company of fewer than fifty people), one was in Australia, gibbering, one wanted to spend time with his wife and child, and one with his live-in girlfriend. You notice how these people all have lives, while I don’t? I notice it, believe me … That left only the very topmost level of management, our MD, CEO and company founder, to wave the flag at this event. And he had a cunning plan; rather than shell out good money on transport and rooms for the night, he would drive us both down to London, attend the dinner, consume a couple of pints of beer, some bottles of wine, and a large brandy or six, and then drive us both back to Oxford in the small hours of the morning. He is a visionary captain of industry, whereas I am but a humble employee, so I had to agree this was a great plan.
And so, on Thursday afternoon, I was ceremonially unchained from my desk and installed in the passenger seat of the MD’s sports car. I know absolutely nothing about cars, so I think I lost some brownie points right there and then, by failing to be properly appreciative. And when I say I know nothing about cars, I mean it; I’ve never learned to drive … which meant, when the MD started saying things like “(huge yawn) I feel really tired, dunno why”, (which is not something you want to hear coming from the driver’s seat of a vehicle doing about eighty down the motorway), I couldn’t exactly offer to take over the driving. The only thing I could do was try and provide an endless flow of stimulating conversation, and I don’t mind admitting I was a bit gravelled for matter by the time we passed Maidenhead.
Fortune favours fools; we made it to the Grosvenor. Being unprovided with accomodation, we had to dive into a nearby telephone booth (all right, an empty function room) to change out of our secret identities and become Formal Occasion Man. It showed at once that there are two classes of people at this sort of thing. Go to the event, pick out a guest, and look at him. Does his dinner suit hang on him with a quiet grace? Is his bow tie elegantly knotted? Then he’s a management type who’s been to a lot of these things. Is he twitching and writhing as if formal clothes are a new and uncomfortable experience? Does his made-up bow tie look as if his throat is being savaged by the legendary Funereal Vampire Moth of the Philippines? Then he’s a programmer who’s been specially cleaned up for the occasion.
If you pick out a guest at random, by the way, the odds are pretty good that it will, in fact, be a “he”. I don’t think the proportion of women at this event exceeded ten per cent. Sometimes I wish I worked in a less male-dominated profession. Sometimes I just wish I met more women. Preferably loose-moralled and desperate.
We needed to meet up with the delegation from our client. Where might we find them? we wondered, as we headed for the bar … sure enough, there they were. (2 elegantly knotted, 1 Funereal Vampire Moth, if you were wondering.)
I have to admit, the Great Room at the Grosvenor is impressive. I could easily imagine elegant couples in evening clothes dancing on that great floor, while the band played timeless swingtime classics and the chandeliers blazed with light above. Actually, I pretty much had to imagine it, as the organizers had packed it with as many tables at £150 per place as they could manage without actually crushing people to death. If you leaned back in your chair, you’d either knock over a waiter or bump heads with someone on the next table. Given that our office is similarly cramped, I felt right at home.
Can’t complain about the food, though I admit I was a bit lost - I’m a great believer in the virtues of frozen things in packets, but these were apparently not on the menu. I might have broken the permitted calories-per-day limits of my diet, somewhere along the way. Never mind; it’s not as if I will be making a habit of caviar or roast duck.
Once the remains of the coffee and the petits-fours had been whisked away, we could turn our attention to the (supposed) main business of the evening. The awards were introduced by celebrated BBC journalist and broadcaster Nigel Cassidy. When this was announced, there was a general awed murmur of “Who the ****'s he?” It turned out he came from Radio 4, which has produced some of this country’s finest radio comedy and most incisive financial journalism; Mr. Cassidy proved to be a financial journalist trying to be a comedian. He opened with a series of IT-related jokes, most of which had already circled the globe several times via the Internet, and, exhausted by the journey, fell flat at his feet.
Some people take these awards very seriously. Among them were some Germans who were seated opposite our small delegation - we knew they took them seriously, because, when the first two categories were announced, and they realised they hadn’t won, they left so quickly that I didn’t spot them go. Germans - blink - no Germans. Just scorch marks on the carpet. We hadn’t been taking the awards all that seriously - we hadn’t done any great degree of lobbying or corruption in order to win. So, it came as a pleasant surprise when, despite competition from the likes of Cable and Wireless and GlaxoSmithKline, we won in our category. The MD went up with the client’s e-commerce director to collect the award, and revised his “beer, wine, brandy” plans to include champagne.
Although we’d won Best of Breed, as it were, we didn’t get Best in Show. That went to an outfit doing some sort of data security work, and they were very pleased about it. And showed it. I think everyone should see the Victory Dance of the Data Security Analysts before they die.
The awards were concluded; Nigel Cassidy attempted one more feeble witticism before departing to whatever Hell awaits financial journalists who think they’re funny. That meant it was time for the band to come on, and they quickly proved to be entertainers of much the same calibre as Nigel Cassidy. No doubt taking into account the demographics of their audience, they were doing a medley of hits from the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties. Is there any finer pleasure in life than sitting back after an excellent meal, with a warm glow of accomplishment in your heart, and listening to a lacklustre cover version of Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go? Yes, there bloody well is. Eventually, the saxophone player remembered to turn his mike on, and we decided to call it a day.
While the MD struggled to find a road back to Oxford that hadn’t been closed for urgent repairs during the dinner, I had a struggle of my own, trying to text-message the office with the news of our glorious victory. Look, I don’t use mobiles all that much … Eventually, a partially coherent message got sent, and I could turn my attention to more serious matters, like trying to keep the MD awake on the drive back. We seized on anything that offered any sort of mental stimulation. 1.45 a.m. saw us veering through the December mists just past High Wycombe, desperately trying to think of ten famous Australians. (We came up with Sydney Nolan, Banjo Patterson, Bob Hawke, Kylie Minogue, Kerry Packer, Ned Kelly, Rupert Murdoch, Dame Edna Everage, Barry Humphries, and Sir Les Patterson. Yes, we knew that the last three are technically all the same person. At this stage, we didn’t care.)
I must have got home, because that’s where I woke up the next morning. And I didn’t read anything in the papers about Internet Entrepreneur Dies In Drink And Tiredness Related Motorway Smash, so the MD must have made it as well. It was a triumph of stupidity and baseless optimism over common sense. Which, I guess, is how we won the award in the first place.
