Group Efforts 21

Group Efforts
The Diary of a Workgroup Manager

Episode 37 (1997)

The Hard Man gets results, Danny gets a warning, Llewellyn gets what's coming and the All Stars get a fright.

Monday 7th
The whole building breathlessly awaits the arrival of Bill Campbell, Smithsons' Hard Man of Code, on his mission to fix the Materials Monitoring System. Adding to the excitement is a rumour that Llewellyn tried to establish himself as Campbell's boss immediately after the takeover, only to be rebuffed in no uncertain fashion by Campbell and, significantly, Costello. Llewellyn has now done one of his disappearing acts, and the I.T. lower ranks have taken to ostentatiously reading assembler manuals during their lunch breaks. Andy, meanwhile, has opened a 'This Time He's A Goner' book and is offering 5/4 on a departure before the summer solstice. Remembering Llewellyn's previous Houdini-like exploits, I decline to wager, but put a fiver aside for the leaving-present collection, just in case.

Tuesday 15th
Disappointingly, Bill has failed to make his expected grand entrance, and has hardly been seen outside the Lubyanka in the past week. Meanwhile a surprisingly cheerful Llewellyn tells the management meeting that he's been on an Internet Explorer 4.0 workshop and that we'll soon all have video images of each other embedded in our desktops, or something like that. He also mentions, in passing, that thanks to Bill's 'valuable assistance' with the MM project we should be parallel-running it by the end of the month, earning a murmured 'excellent news' from Costello. Impressed, Andy lengthens the odds to 5-1, but gets few takers.

Friday 18th
Martin Jones from Office Services emails me to say that our outside call costs are up 150 percent, and that I'd better get a story together before Costello sees the report. Examination of the Usual Suspect's PC reveals, not entirely unexpectedly, an internal 33.3K modem (sans speaker and BABT sticker) and links to most of the sites mentioned in a recent magazine article on 'The Menace of Web-based Filth'. Reminding a chastened Danny that phone misuse on this scale is a sacking offence, I call Amrat and we hastily inaugurate a departmental Office 95/Internet integration pilot, beginning three weeks ago. The modem joins the other ex-Danny hardware in the Cupboard of Sin, and, in accordance with sentencing guidelines, the lad does two rounds of community service in Peg's Department of Correction on the way home.

Thursday 24th
The reborn MM system is ready for trials a week earlier than expected, and the results are stunning, with everything twice as easy and completing in half the time. The girls have stopped demanding that I sabotage the new system, and started demanding that I sabotage the old one instead. Amrat says it's this fast because the back end runs as pure NLM code, whereas Llewellyn's business logic ran in COM-based NT applications. I tell him I agree entirely, and the girls that I'll see what I can do. Meanwhile Bill Campbell's been having regular meetings with Costello, while Llewellyn's extremely touchy about anything to do with 'Materials' or 'Monitoring'. Andy's reduced his odds to evens, and is doing good canteen trade.

Wednesday 30th
Despite our anticipation the actual news is still quite stunning - Bill Campbell has been appointed Group I.T. Manager, with overall responsibility for both companies' systems, especially in an integration context. In theory this doesn't affect Llewellyn's position, but in practice it kills his openly-held boardroom ambitions stone dead and is, in real terms, a demotion. Instead of the expected euphoria a curious sympathy has developed for the stricken man, with his own troops abandoning their assembler books and George issuing an unprecedented invitation for him to join the All Stars at lunch. Commiserations are in full flow when Llewellyn suddenly asks why we think that Bill will be the only Group manager to be appointed, and who we think the others will be. One by one our faces lose their colour, and a silence falls over the table as we all turn glumly to our puddings.