Ever Decreasing Circles

*names have been changed to protect the guilty

Sometimes the pointlessness of what we do hits home with a sickening crunch, the hoops we are jumping through trip us up and we land on our faces. One of those days when only a large Scotch or equivalent will do when you finally get out of here, the kind of day where on the way to your car you get shat on by an albatross only to find the aforementioned car doesn’t start, the kind of day where if you don’t smoke you wish you did and if you do you are on your second pack and wondering when it will kill you.

A colleague of mine, we shall call him Bernard* has recently moved departments internally in our organisation, fresh challenges, fresh faces and hopefully a fresh start.

Bernard has been given a piece of work to do, it starts out fairly straight forward but soon turns into a baptism of fire reminiscent of the first 20 minutes of Shaving Ryan’s Privates, the fecal matter has hit the spinning thingy and Bernie is trying to pull out all the stops to deliver the undeliverable.Its Friday afternoon, B is struggling to make progress through the stinking morass that makes up the processes, procedures and sign offs that means he’ll be able to have the new shiny application installed and ready and waiting for the peons to use on Monday, its not the actual work that is the problem, B has called in a favour (remember when everything ran smoothly, those were the days when the only procedures we worried about were surgical and the world ran on favours and counter favours, fine times indeed!) and has a pointy cone head type poised over his keyboard.Its fast approaching deadline time, B can feel his new managers eyes on his back, the last hurdle, the last conference call with our trans Atlantic cousins (every family has a cousin like this, the one whom everyone pretends doesn’t have learning difficulties but really does)Its done! he’s done it, achieved the impossible! its all go, he can’t believe it , mission accomplished – and then a lone pointy cone head voice shatters Bernard’s euphoria…. ‘ummmm someone did remember to order the hardware last year to install this on didn’t they??’ followed by the longest and most pregnant of pauses…….

As a red eyed Bernard said to me over a stiff Scotch that evening ‘its like inviting your mates round to watch the football and forgetting to buy the ****ing telly!’