So that’s the end of my jury service. Shocking, confusing, nerve-wracking, edifying, sobering, thought-provoking, even amusing at times… life will never feel quite the same again. Seems odd to think I’ve never considered the law as a profession – it’s the perfect mix of people-watching and the application of cold logic. I reckon I would probably have made a pretty good barrister. Too late now, but maybe in the next life…

The most interesting thing about being inside a courtroom is the tension – palpable at times – the barristers and judge are very much constrained by what they can and can’t say, but there were occasions when it was clear to us in the jury exactly what the counsel was trying to do, yet for some reason it wasn’t to the person in the witness box. At such times I caught myself literally out of breath – will they say it? Do they see what’s going on? How many different ways can the counsel put the same question? Is the counsel barking up the wrong tree entirely? Is this a critical piece of evidence – a clear contradiction between what the witness said to the police and what they’re now telling us, or is it simply stage fright? Is the judge about to tell counsel off for leading the witness into saying something they don’t mean? Is he going to clarify the question, enabling the penny to drop?

Absolutely fascinating.

I had never set foot inside a courtroom until a couple of weeks ago, but now I’m tempted to visit the public gallery from time to time – it’s an entirely different world.

Blimey, is it really 20 years since the Berlin Wall was first opened? I can remember that evening as clear as if it were yesterday. I’d visited Berlin for the first time that July, and at the time it seemed that the wall was there to stay. Even when the TV pictures of the hoardes of East Germans going on permanent holiday via Hungary started to be shown, I thought “no way.” So when I came home from work that night and saw the pictures of people streaming through the Bernauer Strasse checkpoint I was utterly amazed. Had to get a takeaway pizza and a four-pack of McEwans Export to celebrate, right there and then.

20 years, eh? Incredible. In theory 20 years is a long time. In reality it’s nothing. On the Liesenstrasse in Humboldthain there’s still a section of the wall that nobody seems to have done anything about. It’s not an official monument, but it also hasn’t been torn down. It hasn’t been hacked to bits by souvenir hunters, either (well, I admit I’ve got a big chunk of it on the shelf in the box room). It’s just there. Still.

And I’m still a programmer. 20 years – blink and you miss it.

‘Tis nearly the season of the Bell Curve. Again. In less than a month from now I could be out of a job.

Again.

Despite there being next to no software department left to downsize, the rumour mill is busy grinding out the usual gloomy doomness – it seems that the company are intent on axing the usual two or three, after all…

All completely illegal, of course, but that won’t stop them.

So we’ll be down to less than 20 developers, and the lucky two or three sacrificial lambs will be looking at six months’ “go quietly” pay and a trawl round the local job market.

To be honest, I don’t give a sloppy any more whether it’s my turn or not. I’m fed up of two week “sprints”, management-induced artificial crises, patronising pep talks, ill-judged threat-talks, meaningless breathless “new logo” announcements and all the rest of the shite that passes for “communication” hereabouts.

Maybe my stint of jury service has woken me up to The Real World at last. Yes, it seemingly does exist. Perhaps it’s time I took my place in it.

LOL, meanwhile, back in my own little Dream World I’m sitting pretty on 82407 words of a novel that I’m convinced will be published one day.

Can’t hurt to dream, can it?

Wasn’t Swine Flu. Not yet, anyhow. The book arrived. Was scribbled over. Almost enjoyed.

Moved on to JEE now. How long can this last?

I think I must be coming down with something. I feel very out of sorts. Only three hours ago I caught myself thinking “I must buy a book on this, it’s actually quite interesting”.

The subject?

Maven. Yes, MAVEN! A build tool! And a bloody hideously over-engineered one, at that!

What’s the matter with me? I never find software technology interesting any more. And builds? Forget it! What the hell is interesting about slapping a bunch of files together into a jar? Nothing!

And what’s all this about buying a book?

I never buy books about software any more. I’ve got shelves full of dusty old Microsoft books – MFC, OLE, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 3.1 – ancient, stone-age rubbish that I just haven’t got round to throwing away. Yet, these are the books that actually stood the test of time – I could count on them being useful for at least a couple of years. Then along came Java and doing things “on Internet time”. No sooner was a book published than the technology underwent a major point upgrade – usually deprecating all the old APIs that you’d just taken the time to learn, when it turned out that the APIs were in fact a load of half-baked old bollocks.

Since then things have gone from bad to worse – even the official websites of supposedly “mature” technologies are full of out-of-date information. So why buy a book?

Can’t beat a good scribble in the margins, that’s what. I like scribbling on my books. And filling them full of Post-It note placeholders.

So. I must be ill. Perhaps it’s Swine Flu, at last?

Been up to HR today. Nothing serious. Just needed to get a form filled in.

Guess what… there was NOBODY THERE.

Not a soul.

They were all (I say “all”, when I really mean “both” – it’s not much of a Department any more) in the  other offices. If they were lucky they’ll be in London, otherwise it’s the wastelands of Reading I guess.

So. No HR! I thought it was impossible for a company to function without those magnificent Wealders Of The Company Manual. I guess I’m wrong.

“Fun” is this month’s buzzword. Apparently we’re all supposed to be having it regularly. At least once a fortnight, anyhow. For most of us married types that’s way more than we’re used to.

The Company Approved Definition of “fun” is:

A regularly-scheduled agenda-free meeting where team members get together in a relaxed and informal way to discuss the issues of the day. Team members take it in turns to bring in a selection of doughnuts, cakes, pastries etc.

Apparently this provides us with a number of “opportunities”, such as “the opportunity to eat something nice”, “the opportunity to learn something interesting about one of your team members”, “the opportunity to vomit on the speaker phone and sabotage those horrible delay- and echo-ridden internet-based phone conferences”.

Okay, I made the last one up. But somebody else made up the others. And s/he got paid for it.

But what are we looking at, in reality? Meetings with no purpose. Company-enforced (but not paid for) obesity. More sitting about talking instead of doing. Seems a bit silly to me. But what do I know?

Strange things are afoot, that’s for sure. Managers are dropping the word “fun” into their presentations with alarming regularity. It seems our management is adopting Leninism – wasn’t it Lenin who said “a lie told often enough becomes truth”?

In common with the rest of the known universe we’re currently victims of various “freezes”. You know the deal – employers using this media-inspired credit crunch economic crisis recession meltdown (or whatever they’re calling it this week) to get all cheapskatey on us poor employees. We’ve had a travel freeze. We’ve had a pay freeze. We’ve had a headcount freeze. Who knows – maybe come winter they’ll turn off the heating and we’ll all freeze properly.

Opinions are divided as to whether or not these freezes are the result of a genuine need on the part of the company to cut costs. Some higher-ups would argue that even with a billion-plus in the bank and a steady and predictable revenue stream there’s no guarantee that unusual sunspot activity, terrorism, or swine flu won’t seriously disrupt the company’s ability to “deliver shareholder value”, so now is the right time for cost-cutting measures. Fair enough – everyone’s entitled to a point of view, even if it does happen to be of the insides of their arse.

Imagine my surprise, then, to come in to work yesterday and find we have a new team member. His name is Reggie The Reward Rhino.

No, but seriously.

He’s a cuddly little fun*-filled fella about the size of the average underpowered out-of-warranty desktop PC box (the big boxy beige jobs, not the newer Xbox-shaped black ones that overheat and fry your hard disk). The kind of kit we try to develop our software on.

Reggie’s role is to sit on top of one of the above-mentioned PCs for a week. He carries a card that tells the world how wonderful the PC’s user is – how s/he “went the extra mile” and “demonstrated company values” – that sort of pukeworthy nonsense. At the end of the week the recipient passes him on to another do-gooder, thus ensuring the spreading of Good Vibes around the office.

So far Reggie’s ended up with one bin on his head, two plastic bags (Sainsbury’s and Tesco’s), a greasy Subway wrapper, and a neatly-crafted archery target stuck to his forehead. If he doesn’t escape from the Development trenches soon I suspect he won’t see Christmas. His best chances of survival are to make it to HR, but I can’t see anyone wanting to put in a good word for them at the moment.

* we’re currently experiencing a major Fun Epidemic in the company. More on this in later posts. Prepare to be amazed. And not a little appalled.

So, this time forty years ago I was a gobsmacked little kid:  I was up late. Watching telly!

For someone who was normally packed off to bed ASAP so that the bids could have a bit of peace at the end of their day, this was nothing short of incredible. My dad actually wanted me to stay up and watch the telly with him.

‘In years to come you’re going to want to say you watched this. Trust me.’ he might have said. Me, I was too busy asking for another bit of toast and Marmite. And another glass of lemon squash, please, mam.

These blokes called Neil Armstrong and Buzz (“that a daft name, isn’t it dad? why’s he called Buzz?” “he’s American, son, they tend to have funny names.”) Aldrin were going to land on the moon. Apparently this was a big deal, even though back then I used to do it pretty much every week. There was this one time when I made it there and back in about twenty minutes in a cardboard box that up until I remodelled it had been a simple container for an English Electric cooker.

So, they landed on the moon. My dad smiled a lot. My mam shrugged her shoulders and called my dad “a big kid”. I ate a lot of toast and Marmite. Then a fuzzy white blob came down a fuzzy white ladder and bounced about on the fuzzy white screen. People on the telly said it was a Historic Occasion. It certainly was. It was another five years before I got to stay up that late again.

So, I’m back again. Still in the same job – for now – the Bell Curve hasn’t claimed me just yet, nor has the recession. Needless to say our Lords And Masters have used all the media hype as an excuse for a pay freeze. I guess that makes me luckier than the poor buggers that work for BA, but after 5 years of not keeping up with inflation I’m still allowed a minimoan, aren’t I?

So what’s happened since I’ve been away?

We’ve officially Gone Agile.

This is the latest fad in software development. It means the bosses get to make us deliver something every two weeks. It’s called “sprinting”. Every day we get to have a “scrum” in the morning, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. We don’t have to all get into a sweaty group hug or anything. We just sit about in a meeting room and say what we did yesterday, what we’ll be doing today, and list all the things that are likely to stop us from achieving anything (we’re not allowed to complain about having too many meetings, however).

In short – Agile is even more fucked up than the last “methodology” we supposedly used. I feel several rants coming on…