Slapstick of another kind

My finger ends are shredded; my teeth ache in the grinding; the pains in the chest are back with a vengeance and I can hear the blood thumping its way through my veins.

I have been sitting through a software demo with my betters.

Milton made the arrangements and emailed Poxy Team to ask them to invite staff to come and have a vada. A few were asked on Tuesday evening and a couple of others this morning. Mary told Frog about it in passing on Tuesday as he was leaving the office.

"I'm too busy to go but you can go."

Running between meetings and phone calls he's collared by T.Aldous this morning.

"When's this demonstration?"

"What demonstration?"

"Why haven't you gone to it yet, Frog?" asks Mary.

The demo is OK, rather better than the product in fact, which isn't actually bad. I struggle with these because I find that most of the innovations posited are things I've been trying to get Management Group to take on board for years. This isn't because I'm particularly brilliant, just that it generally takes two or three years for the library software industries to translate bullshit to beta. It generally feels like I'm having my nose rubbed in it.

Things are made worse by Julia and Doreen. I've spent most of this morning fighting the urge to stand up and shout at them: "You girls! You sit over there and you sit over there. Keep quiet and hands on heads!" Especially as much of Doreen's commentary is ignorant bollocks about our library systems.

Doreen: (whispers) "Our system doesn't do that, we should be able to do that."

Kevin: (thinks) "It does do that. I've shown you how to do that. You just don't want to do that."

Demonstrator: "Here's how you can feed news about events in your library to customers' personal pages or Windows Vista."

Doreen: (whispers) "That's good. I've always said we should do that."

Kevin: (thinks) "It would help if you could tell us what's going on in this building, love."

The last piece of the demo aims to show us a management information overlay on our library management system. Only Milton and I stick around for this as the others are managers who need information for managing services. Doreen's Parthian shot is:

"Ah well, back to our rubbish systems..."

Ignorant cow.

Frog gets downstairs and is confronted by Mary.

"Where on earth have you been?"

Getting back to my desk I find that the whole of our People's Network has collapsed. Happy days.