Dem Bones

When I got up at 04:00 on Easter Sunday, I did not do so for fame. I simply wanted to be present at the first Eucharist of Easter at my church. A few hardy souls had spent the night in vigil at the church, not sleeping till Easter dawned. But I was driving to Wales on Sunday, so I needed my sleep. I did not voluteer to read the old testament reading because I wanted to be broadcast on the internet - I simply wanted to participate in the service, and Father John asked me if I'd like to read. I was unaware until today that Dr Durrant had brought his video camera along to the service. And so it was that this morning I discovered that my voice, and a dark image of my face, are on YouTube, reading the valley of the bones passage from Ezekiel. It's a bit dark, but this was dawn - about 05:30 on 2008-03-23 (and the temparature was about -3 C). The sound isn't brilliant, but I didn't read it very well, so that's perhaps just as well.

Passion Plays

This Holy Week I've been watching a couple of interesting new dramatisations of the passion story. First the BBC's excellent The Passion, serialised over the week, and last night I saw Redemption Song by the Riding Lights Theatre Company. Both pieces have given me plenty of new angles on this familiar story.
The Passion depicting not only the familiar characters, but attempting to capture the background of the politics of the time. It brings new light to the characters of Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas, also giving some interesting insights into Jesus Barabas and even to Judas Iscariot.
Redemption Song emphasised the Roman occupation of Judea, and used this as a metaphor for the occupation of our souls by sin. It also placed great emphasis on "the tradition" (i.e. Judaism), throwing the Roman occupation into even starker contrast - two peoples living different lives in the same city. Anyone in York or Southampton this week should make an effort to see this play. I left the theatre feeling I needed to go on a retreat to think through all the new ideas.

More on the Wake

Someone took a video camera to the CMG wake, and so our evening is now immortalised on youtube, including an interview with Barbara Ward, the former HR director of CMG.
I think this was made later in the evening, judging by the fact that the crowds have thinned a little, and someone is waving money at the bar staff. I have now found out that there were 47 donors to the kitty, giving a total of some GBP7,500.

CMG Wake

The CMG Wake last Friday was a really good night. I arrived at The Knights Templar in Chancery Lane some time after 18:00 to find the place already packed to bursting point. The first impressions on opening the door were of a sea of people and wall of noise. In spite of the high ceiling, the sheer number of conversations taking place in this great hall reverberated round the place and hit you as great din. People were packed so tightly into the pub that it took some 10 minutes, perhaps more, to cross the room and reach the bar. Thanks to a handful of very generous people there was a tab open for anyone waving a slip of paper saying “CMG”. The smart ones had diversified out of CMG shares during the good times, and locked in the profits before the dot.com bubble burst; there were probably a good few millionaires in the room and some people were kind enough to stand us all a few drinks.

I was tempted to buy myself two drinks to save fighting my way back to the bar, but decided against it. One hand had to be free for hand-shaking. And how many hands I shook that evening! After 15 years with the company, there were so many people I’d worked with and lost touch with. And many people I knew by sight, or by reputation. There were people kitted out in CMG ties and scarves, T-shirts and baseball caps. I heard so many tales of what people were up to now. Quite a few still working for Logica; many now moved on to pastures new; some living lives of leisure; others running their own businesses; one or two looking for new challenges as the came to the end of redundancy packages.

The bar tab was finally exhausted by 20:00, but this didn’t deter many people, and the pub continued to be just as crowded for a couple more hours until I left. Photos of the event are available at http://wakeywakey.dreamhosters.com – I haven’t spotted myself in any of these yet, but there are plenty that give an impression of quite how busy the place was. I have a tape of the 25^th anniversary song “Nobody does IT better, and as soon as I can get it copied to MP3 I’ll post it there too.

I’d like to thank John Sharp for organising the evening. I wonder if that’s the last we’ll hear of CMG, or will this become a regular reunion. I somehow think that CMG was such a big part of so many people’s lives it won’t be forgotten quickly.

CMG R.I.P.

In 1990 I got a job with a fairly small IT services company called CMG. Over the next 10 years it grew steadily into a medium sized IT services company. There was an incredible sense of community in the company. All the shares were held by the staff and there were regular after work updates on how business was going - followed by drinks on the company. When the company went public in the December 1995 it made quite a few millionaires over night, and over the following few weeks, as the share price went through the roof (sadly I was not among them). At one point during the dot.com bubble the company was worth something like 70 times the floatation price, and many employees had aquired shares at a fraction of that price . However, during those heady, frothy days at the turn of the century, CMG made a rather poor investment in merging with an overpriced and over large IT services company called Admiral. As a result of that deal, and the should-have-been predictable collapse in IT stocks a few months later, CMG became a take-over target itself; and in December 2002 was bought up (they say "merged", but we all know the truth) by Logica, forming LogicaCMG. I left LogicaCMG in 2005. Today, LogicaCMG has renamed itself to just "Logica", so CMG now officially no longer exists.

One long-serving member of CMG has organised a "wake" to mourn the loss of this great name. About 700 former employees will be meeting in a pub in the City of London on Friday evening 2008-02-29 to re-live the good times for the last time. CMG, R.I.P.

Why can’t they just apologise

Have you ever complained about something? Have you ever had your complaint taken seriously? Or do you just get fobbed off? I’ve found an increasingly common response to any complaint is “well you’re the first complaint we’ve ever had” with this implication that it’s good enough for everyone else, so you can bloody well put up with it too.

Here’s an example: a website called Intelligent Giving. It’s a very interesting website, and I may well do a post about them. But the site includes a feature they call the “Karma Calculator”. In essence, you answer a brief questionnaire and the calculator generates some insults, hiding behind the excuse of being “light-hearted”. I found it utterly offensive, so I wrote to complain as follows:

"I like your website and find the information you give very interesting. However, I did not like your 'karma calculator' one bit. I appreciate that it is intended to be "light hearted", but to be honest, I don't find sarcastic insults very funny. I am not confused - just in search of the type of information that your site seems to contain; I do understand the difference between philanthropy and misanthropy; and I do not appreciate being compared to a character from an odious American cartoon show. I suggest you re-write this nasty piece of software before you alienate any more of your potential customers."

Their response:

“Thanks for getting in touch. I'm sorry you don't like our Karma Calculator. However, over 6,000 people have used the Calculator since our site launched and yours is the first complaint we have received. We believe it fulfils its function as a light-hearted spur to giving.

I hope you profit from using other areas of our site.”

OK, so they used the “S” word, but did they take on board what I said? But they’re doing their best to do a good job, so look them up and read what’s on their site. Just steer clear of that “Karma” thingy. http://www.intelligentgiving.com/

Pineapple Slicer Gadget

Do you eat fresh pineapple? Or do you find that the hassle of pealing the things isn’t worth it? I’m sure someone has told you that there’s a way to cut the skin so that it comes off in a spiral, but no one has ever actually been able to demonstrate this trick. Then there’s always a hard core down the middle that you have to cut out.

I was given a gadget for Christmas that makes pineapples easy to eat. It’s a pineapple slicer, and it’s dead easy to use. All it is, is a plastic tube with a plastic cutting disk on one end. It’s hollow, with a removable handle. Watch this:

Cut off the top of the pineapple and place the slicer on top of the pineapple and twist, applying a bit of pressure.

Continue to twist until it reaches the bottom of the fruit

Pull the slicer out

Remove the handle, and the spiral of edible fruit comes off

The pineapple skin and woody core is left behind. You could even fill this with ice cream and freeze it.

Now all I need is a source of reasonably priced pineapples.