Group Efforts 21

Group Efforts
The Diary of a Workgroup Manager

Episode 29 (1996)

The Silly Season arrives, Sheila takes umbrage, Rose's stand-in takes notes and our hero stuns the management meeting.

Tues 6th
The silly season is upon us, with Sheila and Cathy en vacances, and June and Danny grumpily holding the fort. Covering for Rose (new mum of 7lbs 9oz Patrick John) is the exotically-named Dolores Stackpole, who gained a certain notoriety in Solvents Stores last summer for reasons which never became entirely clear. Dolores is competent (in fact quite a Word for Windows whizz), but has a distracting effect on Danny and draws noisy crowds of male visitors from Maintenance and Transport. I, meanwhile, have become the subject of coarse canteen ribaldry, to which Llewellyn (of all people) added a suggestive email which I immediately forwarded to his entire department and Costello by mistake. I put it down to the heat, and look forward to autumn.

Thurs 15th
Amrat arrives for our 9.30 OLE Automation Project Meeting. By 9.50 he's still explaining the basic principles of OLE to Dolores, so I drag him away and demand a private audience. He tells me that the OLE Automation Project is now the ActiveX Project, and that we've been nominated as the company's official Intranet Testbed. I ask if it's going to hurt, and he says we won't feel a thing, although he will need to insert another NT Server into our network. Later Dolores says that OLE sounds a bit platform-specific and not really up to maintaining persistent relationships between networked objects, however much Microsoft tarts it up. She also invites me to a darts match in the Public at Pegs. I decline gracefully, but write the OLE stuff down in my desk diary.

Mon 19th
Shift change time, as Cathy and Sheila return and Danny and June disappear. Unfortunately Sheila takes umbrage at Postroom Pete's attentions to Dolores, and a frosty atmosphere develops. I then make things worse by asking, within Cathy's earshot, for Dolores' opinion on TCP/IP as a protocol for client-server applications in a local environment. By lunchtime a deathly silence envelops the department, but my fears over Amrat's impending group-wide Winsock installations have evaporated. After lunch the B2's Bob, fresh from Barbados, spends 45 minutes dangling a large medallion in Dolores' face. Later I learn that Godalming 'B' is ready for despatch, and that Novell is helplessly watching TCP/IP walk all over IPX's traditional stamping ground. Going out on double top, I return Andy Miller's knowing wink with a well-informed one of my own, and buy post-match pints all round.

Fri 23rd
On impulse I invite Llewellyn to my office for an Intranet-related chat. By 10.15 he still hasn't quite made it, but I decide not to interrupt him and get on with some Three Oaks sign-offs instead. Crossing my threshold at 10.40, he says the Intranet Initiative is a Key Component in the company's Information Infrastructure Strategy, with which I readily agree. After lunch our LaserJet develops an Intermittent Information Transfer problem. I call IT and within ten minutes Amrat, Bob, the Microsoft Certified Professional, two men with beards and glasses and Llewellyn himself appear. Glaring at all of us, Cathy pushes the LJ's parallel connector home and announces that she has work to do, even if we don't. The crowd takes some time to disperse, during which I busy myself with holiday leave dockets and keep out of their way.

Tues 27th
At the management meeting Llewellyn announces the new Intranet Strategy, a Key Component etc etc. In response I suggest that while the adoption of TCP/IP is good policy, excessive reliance on OLE/ActiveX is less prudent, and that we really should think long and hard before committing ourselves to Microsoft's Server Extensions since, as Novell's experiences with IPX demonstrated, proprietary technologies everywhere are being swept aside by the tide of UNIX/CERN-derived open standards. Llewellyn and George Barker stare open-mouthed, Andy grins, and Costello takes notes. Later I ask Dolores why she hasn't taken up computing professionally. She says she finds it quite interesting, but that she wouldn't want to do it for a living and anyway computer people seem to talk rubbish most of the time. Agreeing readily, I head for the bar and complete an asynchronous two-phase transaction, with me as client and Peg, glasses in hand, as server.