Leaving Maxiram

I worked at Fujitsu in Bracknell for eight months, helping develop a system for the Post Office to display videos in the lounge rooms where postmen could relax, chat and get snacks. Back in 2007, the technology for large high-quality video was developing fast. Fujitsu was bidding for a contract to supply and install even larger screens at Heathrow Airport, for advertising and customer information. Sounds very positive, doesn’t it?

But I learned that there were fears of postmen going on strike. So brainwash them into thinking that the management cared. For this and other reasons, I never mentioned the  company name, nor even where its British  head office was situated. Hence “Maxiram”, and “Babylon Town”. It was a sprawling industrial & residential town devoted to Mammon, Now read on …

Every relationship carries its own end, as the seed lurks in the overblown flower, biding its time. One dies, the other is born. For the last few weeks, my computer password has been “freedom”, as if escape from MaxiRam would be unmingled joy. But it was oddly stressful to disentangle myself and finally hand in my pass to Security.

For seven months I was the mother of a helpless infant, feeding it, washing its clothes, defending it against bullies, writing notes to its teachers, making it behave properly. The infant has not yet attained adult independence but I have had to hand it over to a stepmother. I’m referring to a database. I should not be so attached to it but they paid me to nurture and nurturing breeds attachment. Its new mother Frances is competent but I spent the night, awake and in dreams, composing anguished notes to send her about its future welfare.

My first days seven months ago were just as stressful. Its previous “mother” (I called him Kevin) had a week to hand the baby on to me, just as I’ve had a week to hand it on to Frances. He used to come down from the ninth floor quite often after that, to make sure it was all right, till he got over the maternal feeling.

MaxiRam itself means nothing to me: an abstraction. The reality was a shifting team of people around one messy project which stuck us together for a while. No one wants to be on that project. Everyone dreams of escape. Some say goodbye but the project reaches out its powerful tentacles and they return sheepishly two months later. I won’t be one of those. When they presented me with a card yesterday, I confessed to “survivor’s guilt”: I could walk out intact from the catastrophe leaving the less fortunate behind. A joke of course: I have mixed feelings but not about that.

Apart from LiveC, who now infests this blog as a reader, the two who had most impact on my time at MaxiRam were “enemies”. I mentioned them in February and I’ve just gone back to those posts and added their newly-coined nicknames: Beethoven and Al Pacino. I fell out with each of them in my first days. Beethoven has big hair and a brooding intensity, a kind of anger. Pacino is a skinny bundle of energy with hawk-like features. He likes to lead a rat-pack of junior managers & be their hero as the funniest and boldest, a man who shoots trouble. I challenged their overbearing rudeness from the start, in sheer self-defence. I admit my methods were crude but I hadn’t worked in an office for ten years and started with the attitude that I didn’t really need this one, and wouldn’t let it damage my health. Pacino and Beethoven are each key players, and each tried his best to crush me. They tried every trick to bypass the database, even hiring others to write different databases. But where would they get the data to feed them with? The various hired hands failed to deliver and melted away or stormed out in fury. Pacino (in the part of Napoleon Bonaparte) spent the month of June hunched over battle-plans (spreadsheets) whilst I had nothing to do and wondered what was being said against me in the crisis meetings I wasn’t invited to attend. Beethoven slept under his grand piano and woke in the small hours to pen new sonatas and email them to a dozen mystified recipients. He competed in the European championships of a sport so rarified I could only mention it at the risk of identifying him. Came back with a bronze medal and on crutches.

It’s fortunate that I knew my job well for Al and Ludwig were alert to every small slip I made. I could see things which would derail the project which they should have seen, but telling management their job can be a sacking offence when you’re a marked man already. The urge to be a hero has waned with age. My precious database was not in the best of health having swallowed some wrong data. As Murphy’s Law states, “A spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine is sewage”. Ludwig and Al were fond of sending me instructions via their acolytes and not directly, but at the end, mutual respect prevailed.

The world is full of compromises and imperfections. One of them is called “work”. I shall miss it—until the next time.