While there’s nothing particularly wrong with Stoke, in a mediocre Northern English city kind of way, there’s also nothing particularly right with it. I spent a week consulting for MSW Technology, and would rather have spent the time in solitary confinement. With bamboo growing through my feet.
I was still at the age where I thought being sent around the country meant that I must be in some way important or talented. Now my opinion is that I was easily (mis)led. My mission was simple: to make sure that the software being churned out by a group of people in Stoke was complying in some way with best, or at least mediocre practices.
The young big city consultant that I was, rocked up at the office of the tiny software house as the staff came in and sat down to work. There were six desks crammed into a room that had seen better days as a broom cupboard, and each bluff Northern software developer came in with his supplies – forty Marlborough red, a mars bar or two and a few cans of coke. It was cave dwelling with computers. Yes, they actually had ashtrays at their desks, and yes it was dark and there were maniacal grimaces hidden behind goatees that bathed in the glow of the cathode ray.
These were no-nonsense software developers. Get in early in the morning, sneer at the whippersnapper from London, and sit down and type intensely for ten hours, only getting up from the chairs to go to the bathroom. I’m surprised that they didn’t work on commodes, so that they didn’t even have to stop for that little visit. The atmosphere was stifling – thick with smoke and the smell of grown men coding themselves into early graves.
Suffice it to say, they were flying in the face of any sensible approach to software development, or at least that was my perspective. While my single year of experience had been with a (almost in) London firm, we did have clients like the UK Ministry of Defence, who required that our work and skills were audited. The Northern code monkeys crammed into their bleak room had no such checks or balances, and were insulting all that is good and decent about relational database design. And if I knew anything, it was that our grandfathers had fought and died to protect us from the perils of un-normalized tables and illegitimate data born out of structural wedlock.
If you’re lucky enough to never have worked with relational databases, imagine that not having enforced relationships is like encouraging your data to go and live at the Branch Davidian Ranch with David Koresh. The team in Stoke were hell bent on getting it’s teenage data pregnant in some kind of violent cross-table orgy, and then having their offspring run around naked and covered in Tuberculosis.
So in the midst of the darkness and chocolate bar wrappers comes a man on a mission. Behold! There is a better, safer way for you heathens. Stop your typing and look at me – I have come to save you from yourselves, and to raise standards for you and your fledgling data. No longer will your tiny defenceless data suffer from high infant mortality rates and have to share uncomfortable rollercoaster rides with fake uncles. I have seen the future and it involves some kind of decency for your database – no longer must it run around the sewage ridden streets with no nappy, up to it’s ankles in indeterminate muck.
If this had been a Stanley Kubrick movie, one of the team would probably have grabbed a nearby thigh-bone and pulverized me with it. Or put me in a cauldron of my own boiling blood. The natives were very fond of their false idols and weren’t interested in the notion that what they were doing was not in the name of the eternal database on high. They were hostile, defensive, and quite, quite wrong and too busy to learn about doing things right.
Which made for a very miserable week in Stoke. There were no lunch-time conversations, since they had sandwiches delivered and ate over their keyboards – perhaps hoping that a discarded breadcrumb might inadvertently hit a key and complete the work of Shakespeare that their infinite typing was searching for. There were no evening meals and beers in the pub. I was a stranger in a hostile land, and each night I retreated to my modest hotel after eating all by myself.
I was alone in Stoke. This was not going to be my future, I decided, and a short while later after a brief email asking, “Do you know anything about databases?” I went down the rabbit hole of a start-up company which changed my life completely.
This post is an exercise I’m joyfully performing as part of Spike Gillespie’s famous Austin Writing Workshop.