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Sign off my IT project or I’ll PHONE your MUM

Honestly, it’s a piece of piss

Something for the Weekend, Sir? When you have to go, you have to go. And when you do, don’t rush it otherwise you can end up with damp socks… as my father-in-law discovered during a hurried slash-and-dash in a not-so-lonely lay-by one night.

I might revisit that particular anecdote later. For the moment, I invite you to consider what the computer has brought to humanity as a labour-saving invention. Do you remember the prediction in the late-1970s that by the turn of the century we will have entered a push-button age? Apparently, computers and robots would take over all our hard work and society would be struggling to deal with all the leisure time with which we’d be left to endure.

Leisure time? I don’t think so. Even by Tomorrow’s World standards, this prediction turned out to be a real turkey.

Listen in as we join a telephone conversation between a team of developers and one of the project’s target users. The latter – a manager – has been given the task of delegating user-acceptability tests around her staff before giving the green light to roll out a new system. Unfortunately, it seems she has what he calls a “scheduling” problem.

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“I don’t have time to do your UAT” [Wot? Our UAT?] “Your system will have to wait.” [Our system? If it was ours, pal, we’d have been using it for the last six months instead of hanging on interminably for you to sign it off] “There’s too much on at the moment for me to deal with your little project.” [No rush, we’ll put our little £5m project back in its little box and pop the little developers into their little cryogenic freezers, shall we?]

Asked whether it would at least be possible to spend half an hour looking at the part-bespoke software that the board of directors had generously commissioned for her team’s benefit, she both surprises and fascinates us with the following response: “I can’t spare half an hour. I don’t even have time to phone my mother at the moment.”

Mother? mouths the chief systems architect to the rest of us sitting around the teleconferencing gizmo in a corner of the room. He’s not sure he heard correctly but he did. We nod in affirmation: she doesn’t have time to phone her mother.

Sympathetically, our project manager makes an unexpected suggestion: “We could send someone over to your site to help out with the UAT arrangements.”

Until that point, we had been feeling dejected to be stuck in this never-ending project, but now it looked as if a freebie trip to New York was up for grabs. Everyone brightened up considerably, shuffling forward in their seats to move in closer to the mic.

“Could I prepare some videos and tip-cards, and set up desk-side training for your staff?” offers one of the team. “Would you like a one-on-one refresher demonstration at your office?” suggests another. Blimey, they’re all having a go. If I don’t join in quickly, I’ll be the only one left to mind the fort.

Knuckling down to the challenge, I blurt out: “Give me your mother’s number. I’ll call her for you.”

Shocked silence. Stupid sodding sycophantic software sidekicks. Someone sniggers, softly, and at the other end of the room, six sick bricks tick and six sick chicks tock.

Calling from across the Atlantic, our Holy User sounds not so much offended as a little embarrassed at being caught out with her fib about not having any spare time and possibly a little frightened that I may proceed with my threat to phone her Mum. “Look, you don’t understand, I really am very busy. I barely have time to get to the toilet!”

Outstretched arms wrestle me forcibly away from the mic as I propose that some “sort of catheter” might be in order. My project manager presses a red button under the desk and burly security guards storm in just as I’m trying to suggest a diet of salt water and Ritz crackers “to stem the flow”. As per usual, I am dragged out the building and roughed up in a back street before being allowed back in. It’s a formality and I’m getting used to it.

Casting my mind back 20 years, though, the irony makes itself apparent: I used the very same excuse while working on the launch of a (long-since-defunct) computer magazine called PC Direct. Expecting to hit the newsstands with a "bumper" 250-page issue #1, a highly successful promotional campaign swelled the eventual launch issue to 600+ pages, and that final week of press deadlines went crazy. I worked 5.30am to 10pm every day, returning home briefly in the intervening hours to sit upright on my sofa through the night, gently trying to persuade my newborn daughter to shut the fuck up.

Knackered out by this intense routine, I found that comfort breaks were impossible during office hours. As soon as I so much as stood up and turned in the direction of the toilet, the phone would begin ringing and by the time I’d finished with the call, someone would be looming over my desk, asking questions, making demands and dumping stacks of paper on my keyboard. On the one occasion I insisted on nipping off for a pee, I returned to find a queue of colleagues huffing and puffing and looking at their watches, awaiting my return.

So the next time I was tackled like this, on the following day, I screamed: “I don’t have time! I can’t even get away to have a dump!” And this would have been true if it hadn’t been for the generosity of the deputy editor who, overhearing my plea, agreed that I should be allowed to leave the room so that I might dump in peace. As I strode off across the office to take this rare opportunity, she rather broke the spell by shouting across the open-plan floor for everyone to hear: “Let him go, he’s going for a shit.”

Hard luck for me, though, because by the time I reached the Gents, I was so uptight that I simply couldn’t go and had to return sheepishly to my desk two minutes later. When my next opportunity arose, at around 9pm, I was walking pretty stiffly and taking shallow breaths, I can tell you.

Ah, how this contrasts with my father-in-law, who can relieve himself whenever and wherever the mood takes him, and allows nothing and no one to get in his way – and is yet thoroughly neat about it. This is a man who habitually stores an empty Evian litre bottle on the back seat of his the car “just in case”. My sister-in-law tells me that he carries the bottle ever since being caught short during a school run, leading her to suffer the 12-year-old indignity of having to sit for most of the journey with a tied-up supermarket bag full of her Dad’s urine rolling around the footwell.

And there was that time when, returning home in the middle of the night after a few drinks, he pestered my brother-in-law – the designated driver – to stop somewhere on the way so he could have a pee. My brother-in-law kept driving a while before purposely pulling in to a lay-by that was notorious in the locality for its gay dogging scene. Naturally, he waited until his father was in er... "full flow" before informing him of this fact.

Hence the wet socks. Now you know.

Aside of these cheap scatological anecdotes, I think we can safely agree that computers don’t extend our leisure hours. Rather, they exist purely in order to solve problems created by other computers; or, if they genuinely provide a labour-saving service, merely free up time that is instantly filled because someone who earns a great deal more than you but works a great deal less has decided to stuff every fucking second of your miserable existence with yet further and ever more challenging tasks that require you to continue sitting in front of the screen until the day you retire, only to discover they have stolen your pension and have been shagging your wife.

Aren’t computers great?

It is also rather frustrating to note that our Holy User with the neglected mum and weak bladder counts as "middle management" and will be the first to complain – very loudly – if the new system falls short of her highest standards of workflow perfection. Each time we’ve pushed back the release date in order to fix bugs, she demands an explanation for “the latest almighty cockup”, as if it would be obviously preferable to have us roll out a system that doesn’t work properly.

When we’re ready to go, of course, it will be another matter entirely. Weeks will skip by. No one will conduct the UAT and yet after some insistence from two floors higher, an indecipherable signature will magically appear scrawled at the bottom of the acceptance statement, to which no-one will admit writing in a couple of months from now. UAT sign-offs are like delivery signatures collected by a courier company.

In either case, we’re shafted. The most the project team stars can hope for is a brief stay in New Jersey – so nice, they named it once. Meanwhile, if I’m really lucky, I might get a tour of a server room in Reading, which to be honest probably wasn’t worth naming at all.

Not that I’m complaining, mind. When you have to go, you have to go. I just wish the users with sign-off privileges would go along with it too. ®

Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He would like to apologise to The Register, and offer an explanation to his readers, for his repeated feeble attempts in this column at poking fun at a certain popular musical entertainer by making crude sexual references. If he should ever try this again, you can call him a naughty little acrostic.

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