Group Efforts 21

Group Efforts
The Diary of a Workgroup Manager

Episode 70 (2000)

(Part 5 of August 2000's five-night summer special)

Friday
Despite frantic efforts, I haven't been able to contact Deep Upgrade. He's obviously gone underground in preparation for his mission, not knowing that it's actually a trap set by Llewellyn. At 9:30, Matt, Andy and I head over to Purchasing, hoping that we'll be able to warn him off at the last moment. Cathy greets us with a cheerful "Come to see progress in action, gents?", but Llewellyn is sombre and says nothing.
        Expectancy and tension begin to fill the air, as PCs and their operators sit silently waiting for the upgrade team to arrive. Then suddenly the door opens, and three men appear, carrying a large stack of manuals and a small set of CD-ROMs. The man with the discs is obviously in charge; I know him as Deep Upgrade. Desperately I try to catch his attention, but he seems to almost deliberately avoid eye contact. Llewellyn, meanwhile, remains motionless, eyes darting continuously between me and his installation team leader. The endgame has begun.
        The upgrade process starts without a hitch, and continues that way for so long that I begin to think that the lad - sorry, agent - has realised the true situation. But then, as the process is nearing its end, the screens begin to go blank - first one, then another, then all of them. Cathy rushes over and starts hitting keys, but nothing happens. After a while she tries an emergency boot disk, only to find that the machine's FAT32 partition has disappeared altogether.
        Llewellyn pounces, telling Deep Upgrade that he knows his game, and that this time he's got him. Deep Upgrade, however, looks unconcerned, and says he's no idea what Llewellyn's on about. Then suddenly it's Llewellyn's turn to express puzzlement, as two Group IT enforcers burst in, confiscate the CDs and tell him that he's wanted at HQ immediately to answer questions about shoddily-planned system upgrades. Llewellyn starts bleating that it's all a plot to discredit him by Deep Upgrade, and the enforcers, now clearly puzzled themselves, decide to take them both in. All four go, leaving Cathy staring blankly at her equally blank monitor screens.
        It's nearly 4pm before Matt gets news from HQ, and it's a mixture of good and bad. The fiasco has gone straight to Board level at Broadleys, with the Group IT director saying that he won't have divisional staff fighting their playground battles on his kit. As a result Chapman's been hauled in, and told in no uncertain terms that he'll be the next Brison unless he sorts it out, and that the directors won't be satisfied unless at least one head rolls. That head will belong to either Llewellyn or Deep Upgrade. All we can do now is wait, helplessly, for the verdict.

Has Llewellyn finally had his chips - or will it be Deep Upgrade, the lad (sorry, agent) who has served Bernard and the All Stars so faithfully, who gets the chop?

(At this point, in a totally unique, unprecedented online media experiment, readers were invited to vote on who should leave the Group Efforts House - sorry, Office. For the result, see Episode 71!)