black screen of death
Last night, I flew home to London from Hamburg, near Germany. The flight was punctual and uneventful enough apart from the fact I was sitting next to a blind man.
When the seat belts sign extinguished, he got his laptop out, booted up and started typing into a completely black screen. So, I assumed he must be blind and using a braille keyboard.
However, this gentleman wasn't blind. He had been reading 'High Life' while we taxied onto the runway. Oh and he also had a complimentary copy of the Financial Times.
There was only one conclusion - this was a security measure to stop inquisitive neighbours peeping at his screen and reading confidential documents and email correspondence.
This could only mean one thing - the gentleman worked for a Government agency, probably MI6 or was the CEO of a FTSE100 company.
Although it killed my last three cats, two hamsters and seventeen tropical fish, curiosity got the better of me and I painstakingly reverse engineered all of my neighbour's typing by analysing his actual keystrokes in real-time.
Here is the exclusive transcript...
To: Sebastian Browning (VP marketing)
Cc: UK Marketing
Subject: logistics for Partner Golf dayDue to the current 'difficult and challenging times', the Partner Golf day at The Old Course, St Andrews has been cancelled. However, as I know a lot of you had customers booked and after my pledge to do 'anything it takes', I am delighted to tell you an alternative, lower cost venue has been found.
We will now meet at Solihull municipal Crazy Golf course at 2pm on Friday 28 November. Looking forward to meeting you and your customers. Alan will send handicaps and pairings out next week.
There now followed a 5 minute lull - no typing - just a frenzy of trackerball activity punctuated by various muttered expletives. The most likely cause was the poor individual trying to resize a picture within a Microsoft Word document. Then back to the 782 messages lying in 'Inbox'.
To: Bernard Barnstormworth (Director Fins)
Subject: status on Megabank opportunityMegabank is dead. The client was expecting to be hosted at The Emirates to see Arsenal versus Manchester United followed by dinner at The Ivy. What they got was a mini-bus to Leyton Orient against Hartlepool and some cockles and mussels at half-time. The CEO just called me to say the deal is off.
Another pause for thought to consume a cheese sandwich and a glass of water.
To: Hannah Brown (IT security)
Subject: privacy and securityHannah - As per your recent memo, my two hard disks are now fully encrypted and I have affixed the privacy screen overlay to my laptop. I must say it is absolutely fantastic to be able to work without idiots gawping at my screen, trying to read my email and watching me visit those dodgy Web sites.
PS. Please can you order me a new 4GB USB memory stick ? I can't find it anywhere. Must have lost it in Hamburg.
chance meeting with man in Gents toilet
In my job, I am often summoned into very important, high powered meetings at short notice. It doesn't matter what I am doing, who I am doing it with or where I am, I simply have to make my apologies and leave.
Last week, a client took this approach to conducting business to extremes. I was standing at the urinals, fondly remembering previous posts on manners and officious, distracting and confusing corporate directives.
As I attended to business, a gentleman in a dark suit, no tie (yes, you've guessed it - 'Dress Down Friday') and wearing a rather incongruous pair of white trainers, came into the adjacent stand.
'Hi, David. Listen - just a quickie. I just want to check that we've covered all bases before the call at 3:30'
I looked down. Thankfully, I hadn't covered all bases and everything had landed in the urinal. If only she could have witnessed this, Norma Jeane would have been so proud.
'OK Dave. That sounds cool but Debenture will be on the call so I just need to check we are all aligned.'
I looked down. We weren't really aligned that well. Subconsciously, uncomfortable at my noisy, immediate neighbour, I had slightly turned away. Acceding to his plea for corporate alignment and strategic business partnerships, I re-aligned myself by facing forward.
'Listen David - I don't think your team really appreciate the enormity of the matter in hand here.'
I snatched a surreptitious glance sideways - above average perhaps - certainly not enormous but then Norma Jeane does say that men do tend to exaggerate a little.
'David - look if we don't get any joy in the next 25 minutes, we are going to have to escalate this to the very highest levels.'
Well, I would probably describe what I had just experienced as 'relief' rather than 'joy'.
Pause. Bliss. Peace at last.
'David - are you still there ? Speak up. The reception is this place is appalling - it's as if I am calling from a toilet. Absolutely. Unfortunately, the worst case scenario does mean dragging Anthony into this.'
What did this idle threat mean ? Was the mysterious 'Anthony' was going to be summoned from cubicle #3 to join us in a Holy Triumvarate ?
'Hey Dave - I fully understand your position but I am going to have to drop off the call now.'
With that, the important man in the suit and white trainers, equipped with the Borg headset, ended the call, shook hands with the unemployed, pulled his zipper up and left the Gents urinals.
Solihull to Amsterdam via London
Norman - Your next post will be in the style of Micro-Blogging... Monday - NSCR. Plaintive request from a customer to truncate a Siebel intersection table. Siebel's official stance on the use of any direct SQL to modify data in Siebel base tables is well documented. However, for reasons that are too lengthy and tedious to divulge here, this particular request was approved. Mainly because they deposited £2500 into my offshore account. Tuesday - Team Meeting at BVP. Interesting to hear what my counterparts on eBusiness Suite do. Ate here. Not as dire as the reviews suggested. Few beers in the interests of team morale. Wednesday - Try (and fail) to avoid being dispatched abroad on my birthday. Cristiano Ronaldo keeps going till the very last minute and gets his reward. A lesson to us all. Thursday - Early start. Sleep downstairs on the sofa bed. Wake up 3 hours early. Fly to Amsterdam. Mundane Production Health Check for Siebel 7.7 on SQL Server. Set up various monitoring tools (perfmon, OM logging and Profiler) to identify low hanging fruit. There wasn't any. Staying close to Schipol (good), far away from the city (bad). Back to hotel. Tired. Process email while thinking about lyrics to 'Sappy' and listening to 'Low' on a tight loop.just the job
Note to self: Dust off CV and apply for this job on Monday morning. Any client who is interested in people 'running projects from cradle to grave' intrigues me.helping people write things down
Today, a gentleman approached me and politely asked if he could ask me a question. Normally, this dialog is a little more protracted and goes as follows:'Excuse me. Is your name Norman Brightside ?' 'Yes.' 'Do you work for Siebel ?' 'Yes.' (although strictly I work for Oracle on the Siebel CRM product) 'Are you from Expert Services ?' 'Yes.' 'Do you mind if I ask you a quick question ?' 'Not at all. Fire away.'Anyway, what was unusual and striking about this approach was the fact the gentleman was carrying a Reporters Notebook and a pen. When we sat down to discuss the various strategies for gathering, refreshing and (in obtuse cases), dropping statistics on objects in the Siebel schema, he actually asked me if I minded pausing briefly while he wrote things down. I am not very clever. I am always writing things down mainly to avoid forgetting them. I tend to gather a lot of data when I visit a customer. Some of it is important, some of it is not. At first, it is not always obvious which is which. As I usually have to produce a formal report, I find it necessary and useful to jot things down. My jottings are normally in a text file which I take away with me as input into the report. This is another reason I almost always exclusively use SQL*Plus to script test cases and take away a wad of spool files on a memory stick. I am not overly organised. Sometimes, I may have a pristine pad of A4 paper but more often I am scribbling on the reverse of my flight/hotel itinerary or a Google map. If I am talking to a Siebel administrator, project manager, Oracle DBA, in a meeting or a conference call or just chatting with an end user, I will ensure I have a piece of paper available. Just to write things down. However, the fact I actually noticed this gentleman was equipped with a pen and paper for our brief chat and also made notes and jottings, merely served to reinforce how rare this seemingly obvious and eminently sensible practice is. Or am I just mixing in the wrong circles ?