Group Efforts 21

Group Efforts
The Diary of a Workgroup Manager

Episode 7 (1994)

An early start, a new arrival, the return of an old friend and an outbreak of hostilities.

Mon 11th
Yet another great start to the week - an 8.45am meeting with Llewellyn about our progress on the peer-to-peer pilot project. He says there hasn't been any, a statement which I can't successfully contradict, falling back instead on general comments about our function being project planning not software testing and does he realise the real cost of disrupting a revenue-earning department. He ignores it and says he's sending us a support consultant to help get things moving. Keen to leverage this rare one-on-one interface I ask if there's any chance of some more RAM for the 486SXs. He ignores that too. The consultant will arrive next week.

Thurs 14th
Amrat's replacement arrives - she's Cathy Reeve, a graduate trainee who's spent her first year learning how Andy Miller's Contracts department operates. I tell her not to worry as we do things properly in Planning. Danny offers to show her his flight simulator collection with perhaps a drink afterwards. She says she'd love to, but she's got to meet her boyfriend at the judo club, adding that as he's an instructor there he could probably get him cut-price lessons. Rose and June suggest, quite lewdly, that a judo mat wasn't what Danny had meant to end up lying on. With Danny as my sole male colleague I could begin to feel a little outnumbered, but recognise such thoughts as symptomatic of a wrong and unreconstructed attitude, so don't.

Tues 19th
Panic breaks out when June's copy of Word for Windows freezes with a 'disk full' message, holding an hour's unsaved typing hostage. Diplomatically postponing my 'always save regularly' lecture, I'm about to ring I.T. when Cathy says she thinks she can fix it. With remarkable intuition she asks Danny for the passwords to any shared directories on June's machine, then logs on and deletes a large number of PCX files, at which point June's Word comes back to life. For good measure she then sets everyone's Words to auto-save every ten minutes. It turns out that Cathy knows PCs quite well but prefers 'real' work such as planning, so didn't mention it on her skills audit form. She apologises for the subterfuge. June and Rose invite her for a drink with the girls at lunchtime. Only Danny looks unhappy.

Thurs 21st
Our new peer-to-peer support consultant arrives. It's Amrat, wearing glasses. I ask him when he's getting the beard to go with them, and he replies with something uncomplimentary about 'user departments' and 'bunch of comedians'. Danny gives a stiff-arm salute and mutters 'Heil I.T.', not quite under his breath. I introduce Amrat to Cathy, mentioning that she's quite a PC wizard. Both look displeased. I tell Amrat to let me know how he gets on, and retire to my bunker for a session with the 1-2-3 for Windows tutorial. An email from Llewellyn awaits me, beginning 'I hear your new trainee is red hot on applications support. Would she like to pop round for a chat sometime?' I reply in unrestrained tones and very few words.

Fri 29th
Amrat and Cathy are not, it seems, getting on. At 9.05 Cathy appears in my office complaining that Amrat wants to move the entire documentation pool onto a shared user machine, a plan that will, in her opinion, bring the shared PC and our word processing system to an immediate halt. Amrat, arriving two mintes later, complains that Cathy is unreasonably resistant to any implementation of peer-to-peer technology, while not actually disputing her predictions. Each accuses the other of not knowing half as much about PCs as they're making out. I should be concerned about this, but for some reason which I can't explain (and am not particularly proud of) I find it quite comforting. I tell them it'll have to wait until Monday, and return to the thorny problem of selecting an opening bat for next week's grudge match against the local CID.