The FAB blog spot

Some of you may remember, several years ago, 24 April 1993 to be exact, when the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated a powerful truck bomb on Bishopsgate, in the City of London. I happened to have been working in SG Warburg on that day, which is a stone’s throw from where the bomb was detonated. I was supervising a team that was doing some maintenance and installations on several of the floors in the building – on that particular day I had taken my daughter into the office with me to give my other half a break. On the way into the building, I noticed a very large cherrypicker/crane in a road adjacent to our building – it was on blocks to prevent movement. When we got to the 2 nd floor, where my office was, my daughter grabbed some pens and paper, sat in my chair at my desk and proceeded to draw things (as 7 year olds do), periodically spinning around on the chair. Everyone got down to the work of the day, ordering in McDonalds for breakfast, coffee - you know, standa

When I last wrote, I was grateful that my kneecaps remained intact, having extracted myself from a dodgy situation and, having accepted a position back in the City of London, went back into the real world of commerce. The merchant bank I was working in was one of the most respected institutions in the City, and my position was in the End User Computing (EUC) department, dealing with IT support throughout the London branch, but also liaising with the overseas groups so that our efforts were coordinated, worldwide. The EUC department was a (generally) talented group of individuals ranging from networking experts to coding and database experts, plus other facets. Bearing in mind that this was 1990, the use of PCs was still a relatively new environment and so the team grew fairly rapidly. We oversaw the installation of cabling to the trading desks and user desks. I recall one particular weekend when we were scheduled to do some work on one of the trading floors: I opened the doors to t

Galvanised by the trip to Chico, I proceeded to write a suite of reports that gave management and statistical information from each of the systems using the software embedded in the product, and we were getting more sales and gradually growing the business, but Norman was eyeing bigger targets. He tried contacting Blockbusters at the headquarters in Teddington, Middlesex, to speak to their technical director about getting a meeting set up to demo our product, as it was superior to theirs and was far less labour-intensive to maintain and develop. Now, one thing you need to understand about technical directors of large corporations, which Norman failed to do, is that they have an empire with large budgets, large teams of developers and an aversion to having their boats rocked. This meant that the UK technical director, whom I shall refer to as Morgan, studiously ignored Norman’s advances on several occasions – after all, why would he want to give up his empire to use a pissant little

Continuing from the last episode, I mentioned that the company that owned the software fro which we were the UK & European distribution arm was based in San Francisco, in the old Embarcadero Center, right under the Bay Bridge. The significance of this will become apparent, shortly. I also mentioned that the guy who was the principal architect of the software, Mike, was a bit “off the wall” – he was based in a town called Chico, about 165 miles northeast of SF. Almost nobody has ever heard of Chico – they even sell T-shirts which say “Where the hell is Chico?” emblazoned on the shirt. It was (at least when I was sent there in the late 80s) a sleepy town during the day, with a predominantly Latino-based population. At night, however, the atmosphere was somewhat less sleepy. Chico State university was, in the late 80s, the home to many upper-middle-class students who, supposedly, worked hard during the day but, at night, partied hearty, speeding up and down the main street in thei

The video library software company I had joined was essentially a one-man-and-a-dog outfit, except there were three of us not including the lady who did the reception/secretarial work and I don’t think she’d like to be referred to as a dog, however appropriate the description might have been. At first we struggled to get clients, as all start-ups do, but Norman said he could sell snow to Eskimos (I know this phrase is not PC – so, sue me for using a colloquialism), we gradually increased the size of the portfolio. As I already mentioned (episode 18) we were effectively the European distribution arm of a San Francisco based company. Norman once recounted to us of a show he did in Las Vegas with the parent company at which the owners and the technical director were present on the stand. Something a sales-oriented companies know well is that you never include technicians on a sales & marketing event as techies tend to tell the truth. So, in this instance, the technical director and t

Not that the following couple of anecdotes about Canary Wharf, although genuine, are actually a first-hand IT experience, but they are still worthy of recounting here. For example, the incident in the works canteen whereby a couple of the security staff were caught in flagrante delicto with one of the canteen staff, causing a couple of dismissals and necessitating a deep clean of the canteen. Or the one where a couple of scallies with the brass front to drive a low-loader up to the gates, asked the security staff to let them in to collect a 100-ton crane, dismantle it in broad daylight (unchallenged - ok, so it was a Sunday, but even so...), load it onto the low-loader and even have the balls to ask the security guard to hold open the gates as they drove out. Unbelievable. You may recall from a couple of episodes back that the head of the Canary Wharf project in London had all but called me a thief because I had lost my receipts for a trip to New York. At the time of the trip, he wasn&

Back at Canary Wharf, I struck up a friendship with the guy who was the communications consultant for the company – a freelancer who was extremely knowledgeable in everything comms. He and I just hit it off and we were often working together at the Wharf. The move of the admin offices from Wardour Street to Docklands was a major project. We were given a building shell (4 Harbour Exchange Square – known as 4HX) on 1st of January 1989, with a deadline of fitting it out one of the floors within three months. The more observant among you would note that the date on which we were expected to go live was 1st of April – inauspicious, or what? So, we knuckled down to the task – the plan had already been drawn up at the admin office and we were just supervising and implementing the plan. This included moving an enormous uninterruptible power supply (UPS), effectively a huge array of batteries needed in case there was a power cut, so that we could shut everything down properly rathe than just