WE, THE REDUNDANT HAIKU POEM

WE, THE REDUNDANT

We, the redundant

Who made a choice not to claim

Wonder about work

It’s not a great time

To build a new working life

Amidst this carnage

Yet keep plodding on

Building our portfolios

Inside our cocoons

@MAW_H (190320)

(Written on the occasion of it being four months since the axe fell on what i used to think of as my career)

UNAPPY FLEET

M'coll gets notification of driver monitoring software

that has to be installed in company vehicles

which all sounds somewhat ghastly and insidious to me.

(Brave New World?  Orwellian Nightmare?)

UNAPPY FLEET

Society sleepwalks

Into Civil Liberty losses
Via endorphin responses

The argument goes
If you've nothing to hide
What have you got to fear

This criminalises
Every one of us
By fuzzy logic-ed association

A growing sense
Of fundamental wrongness
Sold to you through an App

Microchipped humans
Marching into slavery
Not considering consequences

MAWH, 080319

WHAT THE ELLIOT

WHAT THE ELLIOT

One thing I know about poets

(I’ll admit I don’t know a lot)

Is the famous reverse spelling

Of the name of T.S. Eliot

So if with inspirational quotes

You wish to end your pamphlet

One thing you need to know

Is how to spell the name Eliot

THIRTY YEARS

THIRTY YEARS

Thirty years ago today
I wandered blinking and terrified
Into a studio in Didsbury

Ten and a half years later
I staggered blinking and terrified
Out of their office in Sale

Twenty years ago
I sat convinced I'd made a huge mistake
Outside a ghastly factory in Ashton

Ten years after that
I staggered blinking and terrified
Towards another great unknown

These days I sit
Anxiously in another grey studio
Wondering if I've done my bit

Thirty years pass by
In the blink of several
Million mouse clicks

The blink of an eye
Is it time to try something else
Or nothing at all

MAWH, December 2017

COMPUTER SAYS "BANG!"

I work on a computer for my living. The computer does not belong to me, because it belongs to the company which bought it for me to use, but I feel a kind of possessiveness over it because we've been through rather a lot together since it was unpacked from its box two years ago after the first of our office burglaries.

It survived the second of our office burglaries when other machines did not, more out of sheer luck than anything else, so it is now, by some margin, the oldest machine in the office.

Not unlike myself, really.

Last Friday, because I had plans for the weekend, it made sense for me to work from home and to work "earlier" than I otherwise would, so that I could get away and hopefully avoid the worst of the weekend traffic.

Anyway, at about noon, after a good, solid four-and-a-half hour stint, I received an email from our administrator at head office and was in the process of reading it when all hell broke loose and the screen started flickering madly whilst not displaying anything very much and, like the wise old trouper I am, I immediately initiated a start-up cycle and switched the machine off.

It then went absolutely nuts for a while, displaying the "purple bands of death" and various other troubling symptoms before I admitted defeat and telephoned my manager to explain the sorry tale.

After a couple of hours of discussions and investigations we found out that this particular machine type, bought at about the time this one was bought, has been troubled by a graphics card problem, and the card might need to be replaced by means of the machine being sent away for repair, which might leave me with lots of work to do - we are, after all, facing another desperate deadline - and nothing upon which to do that work.

In the end I shut it down, bundled it back into its box and did my best to work up some files on a alternative Difference Engine from the dawn of time which has been known to be booted up from time to time just to prove that it still can be.

So these are troubling times for Yours Truly.

The "Inner Chimp" is screeching its worries about being blamed, or the company deciding not to bother with me, or simply not wanting to pay me for sitting around doing nothing for an unspecified amount of time because I have no equipment to work on.

The "Practical Human" part of my brain is, of course, trying to reason logically with the chimp and explain that none of this is my fault, and sometimes things happen that are beyond my control, and that, to be honest, it's really up to my employer to supply me with the equipment with which to do the job that I'm employed to do.

Doesn't stop me from worrying though, and points out how simply our lives can unravel when a device upon which we rely suddenly decides to say "Bang!" and stop co-operating with its human slaves.

On Monday morning, of course, on start-up, the perverse, tricky little beast worked perfectly normally, until at least 11 0'clock when, for no real reason it went "Phutt!" again. Then, after a bit of a rest - about an hour or so - it seemed to work fine for the rest of the afternoon.

But you really can't work like that, and so, after much debate and discussion, it has now been bundled up into a cardboard box, and carted off to the Computer Hospital, and we hope to see it fit and well in about three to five working days, whilst I muddle along as best I can doing what I can to help, whilst bashing at the chunky, clunky keys of its Great-Grandaddy... which remains a frustratingly slow but game old bird, even if some of the shiny new software packages are beyond its capabilities.

It might turn out to be a long week...

LAND OF MY FATHERS

For the first time in quite a while, I had to go to our head office in South Wales on Monday for a meeting, which meant a long day's travelling and might also explain that it took me a while to "get back to you" if you'd been wondering…?

No…?

Ah well, never mind. Barely even noticed I'd gone, eh…? That's the ticket.

Anyway, it was the sort of meeting where there was an agenda issued.

Yes, and I've become the sort of person who has to go to meetings now...

Meetings are cool! 

Not only that, but they're the kind of meetings which have agendas…

Now, you'll probably be thinking that I've perhaps gone up in the world and maybe attained some level of importance, but (thankfully) that's not the case. It's more a question that the game of "Spin The Blame Bottle" found the neck pointing towards me, and so I had to go and place mine upon the executioner's block.

Okay, so I am exaggerating a little, but that's how it felt when I woke up at 3.30am with the prospect of two hours of staring into the darkness ahead of me before I needed to get up and drive to the station to catch the first train of the day, and, given that the only item on that agenda of any significance seemed to be (to paraphrase slightly) "Give Martin a damned good kicking… A lot." I wasn't really looking forward to it all that much.

Coffee and lunch were both on the agenda, too (because it was that sort of a meeting), as was my departure for the station to catch my train home, so, as you can see, apart from the "good kicking" item, they were rather struggling to come up with anything else for us to put on the list.

Luckily, my "severe talking to" looked as if it might take some time, so a short agenda was probably a bit of a blessing for everyone else who received a copy.

Anyway, I got up on a freezing morning and grabbed a bowl of cereal before we headed out of the door to scrape the ice off the car. Then I bought my single fare to town because I was being collected by m'colleague to travel down in his "authorised and properly insured for business" vehicle, but, because he was staying longer to endure a training course, I was to travel home alone.

Hence that final item on the agenda.

Anyway, despite that early start, it transpired that the traffic from m'colleague's house to the station I was waiting at was very, very, very lousy, and so I ended up lurking hopefully at the kerbside for the best part of an hour and a half.

Did I mention that it was also very icy…?

So, the long wait in the c-c-cold made me feel rather c-c-cross and there was much ch-ch-chunnering and ch-ch-chuntering as I "reckoned" away to myself thoughts like "You wouldn't treat a dog like this" whilst pondering upon the belief that I'd done my time lurking about waiting outside in the cold and the darkness back in the days when I used to get up at 3.00am to do overtime, or when I was a boy newspaper delivery operative.

I did, to be honest, get more than a little testy, as the various messages I sent to the Beloved might just testify, because, whilst I know it's bad enough with me being miserable all the time, me being cold and miserable takes it to a whole new level.

Still, despite the fact that m'colleagues Sat-Nav took him to completely the opposite side of the station to the one at which I would have expected it to, we met up eventually, and my mood thawed alongside my body temperature and my countenance for the duration of the journey was far less grumpy than it might have been.

After all, we do need to act professionally towards our fellow professionals, do we not…?

The length of the drive meant that we ended up arriving about twenty minutes late for item one on the agenda ("Arrival") but nobody seemed all that concerned, least of all me, because I thought this would leave less "kicking" time...

On the way down I was able to witness first-hand some, at least, of the extent of the recent (and ongoing) floods around Gloucestershire which did, at least, put back some of my own worries into some kind of proportion.

The other thing about that journey is that it takes me past two of the more significant areas with regard to my own humble existence. We passed through the town where I did my degree in Graphic Design back in the days when I last felt free from the burdens of responsibility, and the part of the world where my father was born and raised until he departed for the Second World War and chose never to return to live there.

I always feel a tad melancholy when I pass by those places because they make me think of lost hopes and dreams, I suppose.

Anyway, the meeting was fine and nobody had to kick anybody, which was especially good news for me, and, after a bit of other business, I was driven to the station, bought myself a sandwich, and caught the train home again, listening to a series of "Cabin Pressure" to fill much of the four hour journey.

There was just enough daylight still around as we whizzed along for me to catch a glimpse of the green-domed building which used to house the art college at which I studied, which was kind of nice for me, and gave me a momentary nostalgic buzz.

It's not a college any more, of course, (possibly due to the standard of designers that it was churning out), but has been transformed into much-sought-after and rather exclusive (at least that's what it says in the papers) "Designer Apartments" so at least it has now finally managed to get something of the designer about the place.

I wonder if the old place still smells of cabbage…?

Ah well, after that it was all pretty uneventful, really. The timings got a little tricky towards the end of the journey, and I became fairly convinced that my connection wouldn't work and I'd be spending another hour waiting on a platform for a later train out to the sticks.

It was a little touch-and-go, to be honest. The first train arrived back at Stockport at almost the same time as the train out again was due to arrive and I did a little bit of a run-ette from platform four all the way over to platform zero, and was momentarily dismayed to see a moving train adjacent to the platform. Happily, it only took a moment for me to realise that it was slowing down, not speeding up, and, because it stopped, I was able to reach home a full hour earlier than expected and end up by making a long day slightly shorter than it might otherwise have been.

CHANGE IT HAS TO COME

An email from the "Powers That Be" at work recently announced that, after two years of less than robust service, our old personal teffalones were all going to be replaced with shiny new ones in the very near future, which prompted much chunnering from yours truly because, as you are no doubt fully aware, I'm really not good with change.

So, I fretted and I worried, because I can't remember all of the various passwords and addresses that I used two years ago to get the current one working, and I fretted some more and said strange things like "Can't they just leave us with these ones because I almost know how it works now...?" words not really designed to inspire confidence in my ability to seize the future and keep up with the white heat of new technology, I'll grant you.

But then I've always been rather perverse when it comes to blowing my old trumpet and will have a noisy meltdown whilst quietly and efficiently finding that I will get the thing to work fairly rapidly, despite a basic incompatibility between the two styles of devices meaning that the data transfer process is slightly more tricky than it might otherwise be.

Anyway, that's for the future.

In the meantime I had the rather strange and nostalgic experience of dragging my old data from within its circuits and, despite the fact that I seldom use it for that purpose, I found that my life over the last couple of years had been ever-so-slightly mapped out in a hundred or so photographs of things I'd largely forgotten because sometimes a "moment" will happen when you have no other camera equipment on you at the time and grabbing the phone to capture it is sometimes the only option.

So, amongst all of the strange pictures of knees and steering wheels which have been taken as I have pulled my phone from my pocket and hit the camera button whilst handing it to the Beloved when it's unexpectedly gone off in the car, or those pictures of elbows and knees when I think that it's switched off and accidentally catch that same button again, and all of the pictures of documents which I've had to photograph and then email to someone when the scanner has been playing up, there is a strangely eclectic mixture of moments from my life which had been stored upon it.

There are the "official" ones I take of our products as aids to the memory when we have to attend things like the annual trade show, and a picture of a rooftop taken when I was trying to work out how the camera function actually worked whilst I had an idle few moments to stand around and wait whilst we were at a Farmers' Market a couple of years ago, and odd little pictures which were obviously meant to inspire blog postings about thoughts which I then forgot about and never got back to.

There are, amongst others, also some strangely pointless pictures of tiles which I took because I was convinced I saw a face in one of them, a picture of the excitable (and usually quite friendly) dog that some former neighbours used to have which nipped at me one morning, demonstrations of lousy local parking, a vintage clothing fair I'd forgotten going to, several rainbows and clouds, the aftermath of the robbery at the office, and the reference picture I took of the replacement computers which then also got stolen a year later.

There are also images from an opening night at Manchester Museum (including that unexpected sight of the demolition of the BBC building on Oxford Road), various pictures taken in the hospital last year, some IKEA wardrobes which we wanted to remember the look of when we got home, several pictures of snow, Darth Vader with a banana, an apple, some things in shops which I needed to remember later, and, perhaps most poignant of all, a blurry picture of my late mother sitting in her chair in her flat.

Quite a bizarre selection of images, I think you'll agree, and all of which brought back a memory the instant I saw it which is, of course, almost incontrovertible evidence that life is indeed what happens when you're busy making other plans...

TREADMILL

Work...

Eat...

Sleep....


Work...

Eat...

Sleep...


Write...

Work...

Eat...

Sleep...


Write...

Commute...

Work...

Commute...

Eat...

Sleep...


Write...

Commute...

Work...

Commute...

Eat...

Visit hospital...

Sleep...


Fail to write...

Commute...

Work...

Commute...

Eat...

Visit hospital...

Sleep...



Fail to write...

Commute...

Work...

Argue...

Work some more...

Commute...

Eat...

Visit hospital...

Sleep...

(Who says life is dull...?)

THE PRAT IN THE HAT

Around about twenty five years ago, a timid young chap with precious little in the way of practical experience walked for the very first time into yet another office for yet another interview and, despite being third choice for one of two available positions, managed to convince the people inside that he might be worthy of a punt…

Personally, I think that it might have been the hat which actually got the job, and I just happened to come with at as part of the deal, as it were, being, as I was, rather attached to it. After all, my interview technique has always been more than a little useless, what with all the fear and the blind panic and all, and I know for a fact that it didn’t go at all well until it was over and both parties were so much at a loose end that we could think of little to do with the rest of our afternoons so we “might as well have a bit of a chat…”

On such moments destinies turn…

I’ve always hated interviews as a way of choosing employees anyway. Sometimes the better candidates are just lousy at interviews, whereas the confident ones tend to get the job, bugger off for a “better one” a month later, sometimes taking the petty cash along with them as they go.

Perhaps I think that simply because I was always so lousy at them…? After all, everything in life is about “self-interest” and seeing things from your own point of view, isn’t it…?

Later on, and for years afterwards, I was occasionally referred to by at least one of my colleagues as “the prat in the hat” which might have got a little tiresome but did at least prove to me that I did leave an impression that day, and which is why, I think, I got remembered when one of the first choices opted not to take up the opportunity which I so desperately needed at that stage in my life.

In an era when ideas like “loyalty” might have seemed old-fashioned and notions like using jobs as mere stepping stones to a brilliant career seemed to make people rather disinterested in sticking around for long or making any actual effort, even I thought that it might just be a useful starting point for gaining a foothold in the industry, and thought that I might give it six months until something else came along.

Came for six months, stayed for more than a decade… and I’m still not entirely convinced that anything “better” actually came along when the time came for me to leave, in the great scheme of things. Different, yes, but “better…?” Well, it’s hard to say, given how certain things went, but things seem to have turned out okay in the end.

So, at the start of this year, on January the fourth 2013 to be precise, it was exactly twenty five years since I joined the ranks of the “full time employed” for the very first time and left the world of twice daily viewings of “Neighbours” (in the days of Deffnee and Dizz…), too many snack-size Toblerones from the shop positioned far too conveniently across the road, and the surprisingly energetic pastime of a weekly game of Squash behind me forever.

I still have the hat…

THE “FUTURE OF SMOKING”

I pulled up at a petrol station the other morning, as I have to do most weeks nowadays since I rejoined the ragged masses making their various ways through the morning commute.

Every week I have to fill up the tank with petrol, which has the sole purpose of moving me back and forth between the same two places, and finding me using the best part of a full tank of fuel every week in order to cover a couple of hundred miles in order to end up in exactly the same spot as I started out from.

But I don’t suppose that’s an unusual situation. I’m pretty sure that, given the amount of other vehicles which I see to-ing and fro-ing each day, I’m not the only one doing precisely the same thing day in, day out throughout most of the year.

After all, it’s by doing precisely that that I get to buy all the lavish goods and services that make up my spectacularly exciting lifestyle.

Things like toilet rolls and tea bags and loaves of bread…

Glamorous, exciting things like that…

Oh, I know that sitting here in my ivory tower somewhere in what we like to think of as the “first world” it’s easy to complain and moan about the dreadfulness of our mundane little lives when, compared to much of the world, we really don’t know that we’re born.

But sometimes, especially on those days when I have to buy petrol to go to a job I once did quite happily from the comfort of my own home, and when I realise that suddenly having to fork out for petrol again each week in order to simply get there is effectively like getting a pay cut, especially when I notice that my pay hasn’t actually gone up in nearly five years, it really, really gets me down.

So, every week, I pull onto the forecourt and walk over to the petrol pump, and I place the nozzle into the aperture provided and squeeze the trigger and watch as the numbers spin around and around and around and my thoughts drift off to wherever they might as I ponder upon what else I might be doing with those many poundlettes as they are drunk away by my motor vehicle.

Once upon a time I got very vocal about a planned congestion charge. I even wrote to the papers and everything in a proper “nutter-like” way. It’s what I used to do before I discovered blogging. Naturally, some people agreed with me and some did not, which tends to be the way of these things. One “radical cyclist” did go as far as to reply to my complaints by suggesting that people like me in our “country houses” driving to our “fancy jobs” were what was causing the problem in the first place.

I did toy with replying, pointing out that it wasn’t my fault that my job and my house were so far apart and that my own economic shortcomings were what had led to me having to find a job I could do and where that happened was rather beyond my control and that I couldn’t afford any houses that were any nearer to either it or where I grew up but I decided not to. After all, in terms of the abstract “me” that he was addressing, I had to concede that he might have had a point, and, sometimes in life, in the words of Professor Henry Jones, you really have to learn to know when it’s time to “let it go…”

As I idly looked around the forecourt that morning, however, my thoughts were not really on the price of petrol. My eyes happened to glance at a sign attached to the top of the fuel pump and blowing around in the breeze advertising, for the princely sum of £6.95 (if you bought some other something or other) you could have “The Future of Smoking…!”

To be honest, I didn’t think that it had much of a future these days, and certainly I didn’t expect to find it being advertised in somewhere as highly inflammable as a petrol station.

Anyway, for your money it appeared that you got something that looked a bit like a thin plastic torch to suck on, and a bulb would light up at the end you didn’t have in your mouth to give you a smoking experience “just like the real thing” which, it seemed, had the added “advantage” that you could still suck on this thing and not be bound by the restrictions of the smoking ban.

Personally I did wonder whether if you did walk into a public place with one of these devices clamped between your molars you’d still get asked to put it out, and I began to think about how much “hilarity” might ensue when the complainant realised their stupid mistake…

The real clincher, though, is that the wretched things still contained nicotine, so you could still do yourself just as much harm only without filling the air for everyone around you with nauseating toxic fumes.

What, as they say, is the point…? It might very well be the devil’s work to be seen sucking upon a cancer stick these days, and it might be as hard as hell to give up, but do people really, really still need to be seen indoors sucking on a daft bit of plasticky electronic gadgetry to give themselves the  “genuine smoking experience…?”

Give it up, my friends, I think the war is over.

Now all that they have to do is find a way of getting my car to run on the occasional glimmer of sunlight…

ONE OF “THOSE” EVENINGS

It had, of course, already been one of “those” days… Not so terrible in the great scheme of things, and hardly traumatic in comparison to the one that somebody, somewhere had suffered, but nevertheless one which had been full of tiny little irritations (not least of which was the discovery that I am still rather traumatised by the events of late May and have become almost obsessive about security) which added up to your author pointing the car rather tetchily towards home in the evening.

I had, after all, been finally trying to make some proper inroads into a project that seems to be failing to get itself off the launch pad whilst simultaneously waiting for the “go” signal to come through to go and retrieve my mother from hospital, which is never the most relaxing way to spend a day.

In the end my mother found a rather explosive way to be kept in for yet another day and I spent much of the day fending off calls from her social worker who, by some strange means, seemed to have one identifiable skill: being able to put two and two together and making five.

Now I normally have quite a lot of time for social services. After all, my father was a social worker himself and so I do tend to forgive them and give them more credit than the average tabloid editor seems capable of, but when I am being telephoned at work and told that mother’s hospital ward are not aware of her recent bereavement (presumably because she spoke to the one member of staff who didn’t know) or that mother’s “incidents” today were down to “nerves about going home” and not the long-term medical condition which the rest of us have had to live with for nearly two years, my patience does wear rather thin.

So anyway, I headed home sweating in the stifling heat of a sudden warm spell (with intermittent showers) and battled my way through the sudden return of the “school run” and all the madness that brings with it, and arrived home with possibly a ten-minute turnaround before I had to head out again to meet the train.

During the journey home, the works ThickPhone™ had received two messages which had sufficiently drained its batteries so that I had to consider putting it on to recharge whilst I dashed about getting something – anything - done. I had, fortunately, remembered to bring the charger home and, as I went to plug it in, the box of eggs which were well past their “use by” date and which was perched precariously on the worktop executed a perfect swallow dive off it and plummeted straight towards the tiles, opening as it did so to allow the remaining eggs to crack messily onto the kitchen floor.

So my ten minute window diminished in a frenzy of floor cleaner and kitchen towels and I’m still not convinced that this is the best methodology for clearing up such things, especially as the bottle marked “floor cleaner” which I grabbed was really for use with wooden floors…

Shortly afterwards, I left, leaving the house with a faint smell of rotten eggs in the air.

The train which I was meeting was, not surprisingly, late but, confusingly, a train rolled into the station at precisely the time that the one I was supposed to meet was due to arrive and, because they were not on it, the person I was meant to collect failed to emerge from it. Naturally, this was when I remembered that the ThickPhone™ was still charging away on the counter top amidst the debris of our kitchen, and any means I had of clarifying the situation was, I realised, unavailable to me...

“Happily” (and only due to a 29000 volt cable hanging dangerously across the line), sanity prevailed and the correct train rolled after only fifteen minutes of listening to the news on Radio Four, and we were able to get home in time to just about have enough time to grab a bowl of cereal and a cup of tea each before heading out once more on hospital visiting duties, although the car is developing a noticeable tendency towards being rather sluggish at starting these days which would, of course, be bloody typical.

So, as you can tell, whilst none of these little incidents are in themselves massively traumatic or life-threatening, they all individually added up to make it one of “those” evenings and leave my nerves gently fraying and shredding just in time for the next big bang.

Later on as we staggered off to bedfordshire, I couldn’t even bring myself to go through my usual “media disease” ritual of having “one last check” on my various media outlets and email. Instead, I picked up the book about translation which has been gathering dust at the side of the bed for some time now and just about had time to read the same two pages which I always read - which were the ones lurking around the bookmark - before I realised that I had actually already read them. Shortly after that, the beloved returned and was rather pleased to find me there rather than upstairs tapping away at the computer.

“Would you rather I stopped writing that stuff altogether?” I asked.

“Yes” she replied…

LIKE FOR LIKE (EMBRACE THE FUTURE)

One of the strange quirks of being robbed is the concept of the “like for like” replacement in terms of insurance payouts. Normally, this is a good thing. The stolen items might no longer be available and, perhaps to ease the gnawing sense of horror at having been robbed in the first place, a newer, shinier, “upgraded” version of what was lost can help to make things seem just a little bit better.

Anything unique, of course, is utterly irreplaceable. I still have a slight “pang” every time I think about my late father’s silver pocket watch and that went “out of the window” due to the actions of “person or persons unknown” (who may or may not have been future rock stars) over twenty years ago.

The real issue with that, of course, is that even if someone were to magically restore it to me tomorrow, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that it was the same one because I have no photographs of it, I don’t recall it being engraved in any way and for most of the time I had the thing it was kept in a box in a drawer, and the only thing about it that I remember clearly was the bit of string that was tied the winding key to the fob chain, and the glass face that opened up and closed in an interesting way. Well, it fascinated me when I was a small person, anyway…

It was just that it was once my dad’s and now, like him. It’s gone forever…

There is always the tricky matter that the swines who stole your stuff in the first place might come back and steel your new stuff just as soon as you’ve had the chance to get it, but it is sheer madness to live your life under the assumption that they will. You have to get on with your life and, whilst fearing the worst, you must hope for the best.

The difficulty with “like-for-like” when it comes to computers, however, is a subtle one and one which is unlikely to bother the “gadget-junkies” of this brave new world of ours, but is, actually, a right royal pain in the derriere…

It’s the fact that, in the intervening time, the “operating system” will have been upgraded.

Now you might be thinking “Ooh, exciting! Shiny and new” etc., etc., but, unfortunately, when you’re dealing with a company like A**** and A**** who seem to have a philosophy of never looking back and always embracing the future, what you actually tend to find is that your “like-for-like” replacement won’t do the job any more because many of the programmes that you used to use to do your job will no longer work (sorry, are no longer “supported”) and many of the files that you have created during twenty or more years of creating them will no longer open in the shiny new “upgraded” (and therefore “better”) versions of the software that you have to use.

But then that’s the thing when your corporate philosophy seems more interested in providing shiny new toys for the kids to get for Christmas than in actually providing computer equipment that will do the job to the generations of designers who have embraced your products through the years when everyone else seemed to unable to touch your products with the proverbial barge pole.

The “thinking” of the kids in California seems to not even consider the notion that anyone would possibly want to run “legacy” versions of their most tried and trusted products any more. “Why” they seem to suggest, “Would anyone want to use these ‘older’ products anyway…? And look, here’s a nice shiny new pretty thing you can buy instead to play your music on and everything, dude…”

To me it is an act of supreme corporate arrogance to not only make it impossible for things to run at all on your new systems, to not even include older (“Rosetta” or “Classic”) versions of the software in the bundle that will launch when you need to use these particular items to do your job, and to not even make the option of having them available to anyone who might really need to actually open these older files for whatever reason just seems plain ignorant of how the world of work and design actually functions in the real world and not just up in the “Clouds…”

“I’m sorry, Client, but I can’t open all those files that we worked on for you last year in that massive account that you paid all that money for because our computers no longer support it. Hey, you think you’ve got problems…? None of the games I bought with my own money will play either… Well, I’m sorry you feel like that, Bye, Bye…!”

The ridiculous thing is that they’re so protective of their patents from all the various corporate buyouts that they won’t even release the codes so that someone who wants older version of the packages, or just to run a few of the old packages that they used to regularly use, might be able to find a way of doing so. Instead we just have to “accept” that all that massively expensive software that we once bought is now just so much junk (“Tombstones” I believe is the hip and trendy term which seems to be beautifully derogatory to anyone still wanting to use it) and we should just “embrace the future” even though the future doesn’t do the job half as well and takes far, far longer to achieve less satisfying outcomes…

On a completely unrelated note, when it comes to the future of Graphic Design being in such safe hands, I saw a van as I was driving home the other night with the slogan “Where Number One” emblazoned in huge letters on the side.

I’m assuming that it was a post-modern joke of some kind for a TV show, otherwise, well, maybe the handcart has finally delivered us to hell…

SUDDENLY SHERLOCK

The interesting thing about our little break-in at work the other day was how suddenly everyone who worked in the building and who was aware that “something” had occurred instantly became a crime scene investigator for the day.

To be honest, I did a little bit of it myself, channeling the methods of Great Uncle Sherlock in a pathetic attempt to make some sort of sense out of the nonsense and chaos and panic that was running around in my mind as the conundrum of a “locked room mystery” trickled into my actual daily life.

You see, I was the one who discovered the crime. If I’d been walking a dog, I would have become the perfect cliché, but instead I opened up the steel shutters, keyed in the codes to enter our unlit corridor, and noticed in the gloom of the early morning, that far too much light seemed to be coming through the office doors, as if they were open. Three more paces were enough to discover the awful truth that the doors had been obliterated and most of our most valuable business assets had vanished overnight.

Because I watch a lot of police procedurals on TV, I touched nothing, didn’t enter the room, but instead got myself outside, rang my manager to ruin his morning and then rang the police.

“Why that way around?”, you might ask. “Surely you should have rung the police first…?”

“Well, m’lud, the thing is…”

No. Let’s not go there. Sub-Jeffrey Archer dialogue is not what we want at this juncture. Suffice it to say that my brain was already a bit mangled by the shock of what I’d discovered and the panic about the work which had been lost. I rang him because I thought he might have access to a phone book to ring the police via means other than using the emergency number. He then told me to ring 999 whilst he rang our boss, and so I did.

Slowly but surely the morning unfolded and other office workers, not least my manager himself, rolled up as people phoned people, and the news got out to the building’s owners, as well as to the other office workers arriving, planning upon starting another ordinary working day.

Many of the more official ones drove up, went inside to explore the scene of the crime, trampled all over it with their great big size nines, and came up with more and more of their own theories as to how such a thing might have happened, displaying varying degrees of knowledge, personal focus and notions of the solidity or otherwise of the door itself. Those whose day had been screwed up by knowing that they now had to organise a maintenance crew were more concerned with practical issues than those whose work had been spirited away to places unknown, shall we say.

A veritable pack of Poirots all finding it very easy to work out how the villains had left the building, but unable to work out just how they’d got in. “Those windows were open when you got here?” “Yes, but then they would have had to kick in that door to get to our offices” “Oh yes…” and so forth. “Well, that door’s been kicked outwards so someone must have been locked inside when we closed up” “But we checked the place and set the alarm when we left…”

How many times I answered their questions that “Yes, the shutters were down. Yes, the front door was locked…” and so on that I really started to feel like they thought that I was somehow involved, especially when dark mutterings about it being an “inside job” started to drift across the morning air.

I even felt like dragging them all around to where my car was parked just to show them I had no stolen goods in it. After all, as Morse once almost put it, it is easy to confuse the last person known to have seen the victim alive with the first person to see them dead, or something…

Later on in that morning, as other facts emerged, fingers were discretely pointed and suggestions made that shifted the blame around a bit. At one point, as me and my colleagues decided that we really needed a coffee as we waited for the real “CSI” to turn up (a bloke with a van and not much hope of lifting a print off anything), I noticed one of the secretaries standing in the corridor thinking it all through and doing her best Miss Marple impression, for which she immediately apologised, but it shows how addictive this idea of “getting to the bottom of things” can be.

We all need to explain the unexplained and fathom the unfathomable.

And whilst it’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that our world-weary version of “CSI” don’t scream up to the crime scene in huge humvees with a “Who” soundtrack blaring out, leap out in designer suits and super slo-mo, waving their pistols and their crime scene tape around and exchanging witty quips with the glamorous young things from the crime lab, I guess that I’ll just have to accept that crime fiction is just so much more interesting than crime fact, especially when the crime itself is a rather mundane one.

Annoying, but still rather mundane, and I promise that this is the last time I’m going to write about it. Probably.

There is, of course, an elementary mistake made by many investigators, not taking the evidence into account, and one thing that all of we amateur investigators failed to take into account was the “cock-up” theory that has also evaded so many conspiracy theorists through the years. Mr “CSI”, without any need to remove his sunglasses and give us a pre-credits quip, worked out that what seemed like a “push” was actually a “pull” and a certain amount of carelessness from some of the other occupants of building had led to us being more vulnerable than usual in a situation that we ourselves could have done very little about.

A crime of opportunity.

Nothing more nothing less, and one unlikely to ever be satisfactorily solved.

All my hard work and data was probably already wiped clean without a thought before I even got to work that morning, so I can put away the deerstalker hat, pack up my magnifying glass and try to get on with my life in the sure knowledge that Great Uncle Sherlock’s reputation as the greatest investigator named Holmes in history remains secure.