Morning in Leeds
It's heading towards 9:30am, and I'm sitting in a new coffee shop in Leeds called “Caffeine & Co” – it's setup for local businesses to hold meetings – I'm sitting at a long black table with powerpoints all the way along it. There are couches and tables everywere – a web designer type is sitting across the way with a Macbook and an iPad. He's been on the phone ever since I walked in.
My meeting isn't until 11am – about two hundred yards down the road. I'm going to hang around here until ten minutes before, and then make my way over there.
I had the strangest dream last night. I went to see the MD of the company I used to work for (fifteen years ago) to see about working for him again. I got shepherded into a room to talk to a blonde girl who pretty much told me they didn't want me – that I had been difficult to work with, and that nobody really liked me.
Dreams are weird.
In reality I worked for them for 5 years, and wrote all of their business software – from production of quotations, through to sales orders, purchase orders, stock control... the whole bit. I found out a few months ago that they still use the job scheduling software I wrote. I booted a copy of it up (it still works on modern versions of Windows, almost unbelievably) – I forgot how good it was. The MD called late one night and asked if I still had the source code anywhere. I found it on a ZIP disk in the attic, and (after some fun and games getting the ZIP drive working) emailed it over.
I really miss working for a company like that – the consultative nature of the work I do these days means you never really get to know anybody, and you never really get to finish anything. Everythng you do is to a schedule and a budget – and they you move on. Sometimes you are on-site for a few days – sometimes for a few months.
Perhaps the happiest engagement of my current career was in London during 2007 and 2008 – when I commuted into the heart of the city most days to work in the development team of one of the big insurance companies. I was originally drafted in to build a case management system for them, and to hand over the source code. A week handing over the source code turned into three months, then six months, then finally two years. The days were long and hard, but I made friends. I sometimes wonder what everybody is doing these days.