The Rhesus Chart

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.

What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment.

Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity. (Hey, wait a minute, doesn’t this one have thumbs?)

Executions are a form of human sacrifice, after all,

WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES. In our youth, if we survive them, they’re called learning experiences or teachable moments or some-such. And that which does not maim or kill us usually makes us stronger, albeit sometimes also sadder and more cynical.

AFTER WE DO THE WASHING-UP, I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they’re almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn’t stealthily dump core in your shoes.)

Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right

They were brilliant, widely read, incisive, and effortlessly effective analysts and programmers. Which is another reason why, ultimately, so many people died.

(A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.)))

There will be plenty of backup and support, but she’s still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don’t understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dripping from her fingertips is coming for them.

I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird.

And if the common people ever realise that vampires exist, it will be a very short time indeed before naked noonday identity parades are required by law.

And rumor has it that the Central Ammunition Depot hanging off Box Tunnel still contains two thousand barrels of iron-tipped English longbow arrows, in case it becomes urgently necessary to re-fight the Battle of Crécy.

And now my blood ran cold. Because if there’s one thing worse than an IT manager who’s feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it’s an IT manager who’s getting creative.

I notice that Andy is watching our exchange with the still, silent fascination of a fly on the wall that is canny enough to be aware of the existence of swatters.

It popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus... I've been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, it is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.

Hate the sin, love the sinner: it’s hard to stay pissed off at someone for doing something wrong if you know you’d have done exactly the same thing if you’d been standing in their shoes.)

For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we’ve assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar.

(What band does the necromancer dance to? Boney M.)

over-endowed with WOMBATs.” (A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.)))

Um. Oh dear.” “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” “I don’t know. Are you thinking, goats are kind of like sheep with bad attitude? I’m not a fucking chupacabra, man.

There isn’t very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn’t get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control.

if you want to work on data covering more than about one month you’re supposed to phone Mr. Jobsworth at BT and whine for help.

one of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone.

Yes, Bob, I rather thought entity-relationship diagrams were your sort of thing. You’re the expert in Visio, aren’t you? Drawing up UML diagrams of fictional vampire brood hierarchies should keep you out of trouble for a while.

(That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.)

Because if there’s one thing worse than an IT manager who’s feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it’s an IT manager who’s getting creative.

management, bless their little cotton socks, decided that we needed to be Creative and Innovative and endowed with Silicon Valley start-up style va-va-voom.