Tannoys

Tom De Marco and Tim Lister in their book Peopleware attack the use of Tannoy announcements because they interrupt the work of , say 100 people, for the benefit of one person, I agree but....

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A TANNOY!

I worked in a company who thought it was more important to locate someone than not to disturb people while they were trying to work, which brings us to another law;;

THORPE'S LAW OF LOUD ANNOUNCEMENTS

The law states that the number of people disturbed by an announcement is inversely proportional to the seniority of the person being paged; that is, the person who causes the maximum disturbance is the janitor! Why not buy him a pager.

I solved the problem as it affected my team. One Saturday when we were working I took a screwdriver, wire cutters and a step ladder in to work (I could have asked the janitor for these items but no one could ever find him), took the loudspeaker that was in our area out of the ceiling, disconnected the wires and the replaced it to cheers from the rest of the team. No one, other than us, ever discovered that it had been disconnected, but we smiled every time we heard the muffled sounds of loudspeaker messages coming from other parts of the building. This the kind of guerrilla warfare that teams often engage in to get their own way.

Sweets

A few years ago someone offered me a sweet; not that this is a rare occurrence, it is just that this was a particular type of liquorice sweet that I remembered from my childhood, I even remembered that it was called a 'Poor Ben' and I have subsequently learned that it is manufactured by Lion's of Cleckheaton, Yorkshire, in the U.K.

Having remembered the taste of 'Poor Bens' and found where to buy them I decided that I needed a ready supply, I therefore bought a large jar in which to put them, and I kept this on my desk.

A growing number of people used to come to see me with the only reason being to take some of my Poor Bens.

After having given a successful presentation in Geneva I arrived home to find that my wife had bought me a present; a large can of jelly beans!

Not just any old jelly beans! No, 'gourmet' jelly beans! At first I thought, ' I could put these in the jar with the Poor Bens', and then I found out how much there jelly beans cost. The next step was pretty obvious, I had to find some way of the jelly Beans becoming self financing. It did not take me long to find the answer; -' a jelly bean machine!'

And so, the 'Jelly Bean Machine on Terry's Desk was born!'

It did not take long for the fame of the 'Jelly Bean Machine on Terry's desk' to spread. Soon, there were queues of people lined up to put their money in the machine and become 'gourmet's'. Eventually, I tired of the queues and took one of my new customers to the sweet shop to examine the 'Jelly Bean Machines'. It was then that people realised that there were bigger machines to look at, there were bigger challenges to face!

And so it was that the Systems Department became the proud owner of a 30" tall jelly bean machine, together with lbs of Jelly beans, at a discounted price. And I regained the use of my desk!

Ties and Socks

One day in the 1990’s one of the team came to work in a fairly bright and heavily patterned tie, although looking back it was pretty tame. On seeing the tie I commented that I would have to try to wear a brighter tie. I did, and so did the rest of the department, the ties became brighter and brighter, and more and more outrageous, here's a sample of what I mean;

The bright ties quickly became a badge of the team, and even today the team members are recognisable by their lack of sartorial elegance. Eventually, someone turned up with a pair of musical socks which played 'jingle bells'.

Computer Games

During my Christmas holidays my brother-in-law brought a computer game he had been playing, but with which he had come to a dead end. The game in question was an adventure one with lots of puzzles which have to be solved and was called Kings Quest IV.

Looking back Kings Quest IV looks very dated, with pretty basic graphics, but what was important were the puzzles and the addictive nature of playing. I started playing the game, and was hooked! I took the game to work after the Christmas break (against the rules of course) and spent some time playing after work on an evening. As you would expect some of the other members of the team became interested in what I was upto. Before long four or five of us were all trying to complete the game, which we did after a few weeks. Once we had completed Kings Quest IV we rushed out and bought Kings Quest V.

Kings Quest V did have modern quality graphics, and sound, and was icon driven, and so on. But most importantly it had hundreds of puzzles to solve and the same addictive quality as its predecessor. Again four or five of us worked our way through the game on an evening over a period of many weeks.

So, four or five of our team played a computer game in an evening over a period of a few months ......... dot...dot...dot....... and so what! Well, as with many team building activities, the activity spills over into the rest of the people. Everyone became interested in the surreal conversations which would take place during the day, about whether you had found the fish in the barrel in the town square, and did you know that if you picked the fish up you could throw it at the bear who was trying to get the honey out of the beehive in the tree.

The Phantom

During a particular development we had created a security system at the very beginning and it was thereafter included in every screen that was written. Of course, when it came to testing each screen it had to be set up on the security system, and with many screens coming up for testing every day this was a tedious job. As a shortcut a program was written which would add all the new screens together as it was run. And every time this program was run it displayed a different picture and message from the 'phantom'. We asked everyone in the team if they were the 'phantom' and everyone denied it, and so we checked the machine logs but it told us that the program had been amended on one of the testing terminals and we could not therefore pin the culprit down. In fact it took months of the phantom's appearances, and some detailed technical analysis before it became clear who was behind it.

As a footnote to the story of the 'phantom', the person who managed to make all those unauthorised changes to programs without getting caught eventually became a computer auditor - poachers becoming gamekeepers?

NFL

I'm a big fan of American Football, and my 'local' team are the Philadelphia Eagles although as you can see from the following map this is stretching the term 'local' to its absolute limits;



I was once able to see the Eagles play at the American Bowl in London and after the game the quarterback, Randall Cunningham, walked past me - these people are pretty big aren't they?

What's the point behind all this American Football stuff? Well, on the first day of the project I brought in my Eagles souvenir ball and put it on my desk. I then explained to the team that they could throw the ball around the office but only after six o'clock when all the other staff had left. I actually thought that the fact the ball was there would be enough, but at one minute past six on that first day the ball was being thrown all around. In fact, I was sat at my desk in the middle of the office during this with the ball whizzing dangerously over my head. The ball throwing sessions carried on for a few months but the ball has since always had pride of place on my desk.