Rumours—and Resignation

When I wrote this in March this year, it was prompted by finding I had a duplicate CD. But there’s an interesting story of my months working there which remains vivid in my mind but never written up in any form. In the end it was  humiliating, to the point where I pleaded ill-health, and resigned from the project with immediate effect, and came back to London my wife and newborn baby. This was awkward because I’d let my small upstairs flat to a couple in the meantime. They refused to move till the end of the month. I persuaded them to quit by giving them the brand new bed we’d bought for our small guest room.

I ‘d been recruited by Touche Ross Management Consultants on the basis of experience in Quality Control. My programming experience was limited to the late sixties till I lived off unemployment benefit and enjoyed the Aquarian Age.

But this was my big mistake. Our Project Manager offered me the choice: Quality Manager or Development Manager. I chose the latter because it was better paid. Another contractor, I’ll  call her Anne, was better qualified and would have been better off. She hated me, took revenge in subtle waqsy, tioll I could stand it no more. I’ve never had what it takes to be a manager, nor have my children and grandchildren. Team leader was good.

Enough information, now read on.

“As of February 2023, Rumours has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it the sixth best-selling album of the 1970s, and the 12th best-selling album of all time.” (Wikipedia).

I’d never heard of Fleetwood Mac until their first hit, the instrumental “Albatross”, released in 1968. and though Rumours came out in ’77, I never heard of it till ’85. I was working as acting programming manager at Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in Norwich. I had two programmers assigned to the project, because the consultancy firm I worked for had not yet agreed with the client what computer systems they required. Bob Taylor was the senior one and we sat on opposite sides of a battered mahogany desk from the days of Queen Victoria. When needed to be seen working, we wrote reports about timescales for the programming, testing and implementation of a hypothetical system. This left most our days free for chatting.

Bob was a contractor paid double my salary. He was a Cockney, unconcerned with the niceties of middle-class office behaviour, as it was plain he knew what he was doing and didn’t respond kindly to raised eyebrows of our Civil Service client. We spent interesting days comparing our backgrounds and interests. He was sorry for me, with my limited exposure to pop culture and having fun of a Saturday night. So he gave me a cassette of Rumours. It’s one of my most treasured albums. You regularly hear one or other track on Radio 2.

It inspired Radcliffe and Maconie’s The Chain, “officially the longest running listener-generated thematically linked sequence of musically based items on the radio”. You can view the list here, all 8466 songs. You can hear an example of the programme with its theme based on the Rumours song The Chain.

So if you are interested in obtaining any item, let me know via “Contact Me” and we can agree a price.