gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Mr Widget has just returned from a conference on making factories more good, and he seems to have it set in his head that the successful factory of tomorrow will be centred around the paradigm (an excellent conference word) of hotdesking.

I imagine he read about this paradigm in the inflight magazine, or something.

Generally when he goes to conferences like this, he spends all his time in the hotel bar or casino, judging by the stories that he tells.

So, the sad consequence of him going to this conference and reading the word ‘hotdesking’ somewhere is that we now need to implement a hotdesking-based strategy, in order to justify him having gone to the conference in the first place.

Why he couldn’t have gone to a Topless Fridays conference instead, i don’t know.

So the message went out that we were to begin looking at how we can make his dream of a hotdesking workplace come true.

Sadly for me, i went to the toilet at the wrong moment, and, as i walked in to take a slash, Mr Widget was standing there, washing his hands.

«What do *you* know about hotdesking?» he asked as he blocked my way to the pisstrough.

«That’s when you just move from desk to desk, rather than having your own dedicated desk, isn’t it? So you can form ad hoc team clusters?» i offered, my bladder groaning.

He nodded and looked at my namebadge.

That was when i knew i was in trouble.

Two days later (on Wednesday), an email arrived in my inbox, saying that i was on the HDSC (Hotdesking Steering Committee), and could i please read the following attached PDF files on how hotdesking was taking the business world by storm.

Sadly, he’d forgotten to attach the files, and i was in the unpleasant situation of potentially having to tell the boss that he’d futzed up.

So i waited, and someone else told him, i presume, since the PDFs eventually arrived, attached to another email that looked like it was meant to be taken for a reminder of the meeting, and not just a resend because he’d forgotten to do the attachment the first time.

Friday morning at eleven we had the first meeting of the HDSC.

He outlined his dream, which was for us to take our information technology and systems handling protocols (his words) and make them ‘personal’. ‘Personal’ computing was the future, according to the conference flyer, and he wanted us to be at the forefront of the future. He wanted us to be so far at the forefront of the future that we would end up being banned by the TAB from betting on the Melbourne Cup, since we’d already know the winner (his quip, not mine).

Disarming quip notwithstanding, ‘making computing personal’ turned out to mean that each member of the IT support community at Mr Widget’s Widget Manufactory would need to have a wirelessly networked mini laptop that they would carry about with them like a conjoined twin, placing it down on a handy but non-owned flat surface if they ever needed to type anything.

We spent a little time listening to him painting a picture of a future where laptops were so small and portable that they’d just slip into your sock when you weren’t using them, like a footballer’s mouthguard. Then he pulled an eeePC out of a neoprene pencil case with the flourish of a magician producing two humping rabbits from a hat.

«Now THIS,» he crowed, «This is what i’m talking about! You can buy these for three hundred dollars and they have all you could possibly want from a computer: web browsing; word processing; um…»

And that was when he ran out of ideas on what you could possibly want from a computer.

Now, the eeePC is a great little notepad that will let you check your email or FaceSpace on the run in an internet café somewhere, but it’s not an enterprise machine for an organisation that requires a certain degree of sophisticated technological support. I was surprised that he thought it could be. Him being Mister Widget and all.

He told us that he’d given his eeePC a name, like a pet. Well, he told us that he’d given it a name; it was me thinking to myself ‘like a pet’.

He was clearly besotted.

He explained that the keyboard was, admittedly, a little small, and that he didn’t really mind that, given how portable, and … well, personal the thing was.

I looked around the table, wondering who was going to be the one to tell him that (a) his toy computer was a stupid thing to implement for what we use computers for, and (b) that no-one was going to be very happy with giving up their desk to become an itinerant nomad, roaming the hallways and shopfloors of the manufactory, looking for somewhere to call home, some team to ad hoc with.

I knew it wasn’t going to be me who told him. He was actually stroking his eeePC as he described its wonders.

Happily, we have someone who speaks up at times like this. Double happiness came in the fact that she was wearing a white blouse and black bra on Friday, and it’s a known operational stratagem that Mr Widget enjoys a good white blouse and black bra combo.

«Our technical ppl will need more powerful machines than that, really. They spend very little time word processing and web browsing, compared to the time they spend developing in enterprise-level SDKs.» She had a biro in her hand, and she was taking the lipstick-red lid off and sliding it back on, apparently absent-mindedly, over and over as she spoke. «Plus most of the time the programmers and such aren’t required to wander about to find ppl to talk to. They communicate with each other over IM and VOIP.» She rotated the biro in its lid, thoughtfully, then she stopped all those inserting and rotating motions and twiddled it in her fingers in such a way that its glistening red tip tapped against the front of her white blouse and black bra combo.

This was a subtle variation on a similar performance she had used in February to save the company from what would have been a disastrous move into selling to the south east Asian market.

«I don’t see,» she continued, «why ppl like the overseers and such don’t get one of these compact computers, but, generally speaking, i think our tech ppl will be better off keeping their own desks, and their desktops and desktop-replacement-grade laptops.»

Mr Widget – completely boobnotised – admitted that he could see her points, that they were good ones, and said, in a somewhat trancelike voice, that he wanted some ppl to look into it further, to do some sort of a literature search, or something.

We minions all breathed a sigh of relief. A literature search is what a steering committee does when it’s become clear that the whole idea behind the steering committee was misbegotten. It’s a face-saving way of allowing the matter to dribble off into obscurity until everyone’s forgotten that it was ever raised.

So it looks like i get to keep my desk, dear Reader. And my growned-up computer.

If i ever become a high-powered female executive in the company, i must remember to get me a bunch of them white blouses, a brace of them black bras, and a box of them red biros.

Yours,
Gullybogan