An Eight in a Million chance
This is a real story involving consultants, interns and MS Access.
A very long time ago, as a student - that was a long time ago - I worked my summers at British Telecom. They had this lovely big sprawling labs at Martlesham Heath.
BT was itself a pretty big sprawling company and projects moved glacially. Out of this grew a small internal team called ‘FastTrack’ who cut corners and implemented stop-gap IT projects while the actual project was being worked on. I think that was the idea. It seemed we were often doing projects that were just too small for the main IT process and that we were the cowboys.
One of the mentors that I worked particularly closely with was an old hippy called Simon. He was a really nice bloke and we got along extremely well. He had an especially striking appearance though; he was a genuine hippy with long straggly hair and a long nail that he chiseled to a flat tip that he called his screwdriver nail. He was so thin he was was skeletal and he smoked roll-ups. Oh, and he wore a three piece suit. Striking. He would often clean under his nails with a large lock knife.
I remember him sitting on the top deck of a red London bus in his three piece suit cleaning his nails and telling me tales of a rough childhood in London. The bus took a sudden turn and he dropped this massive lock knife which hit the floor point first and stuck there in the aisle twanging menacingly. I turned around just in time to see the last of our fellow passengers evacuating down the stairs. I felt like a gangster :) So why was I in London with Simon? Lets get to that:
