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Issue 19
 Angie’s swamped with job offers, Mike’s empire-building plans are revealed, and Ed does the unexpected (twice).
Monday
Plus ça change, as we say here in Paris. When Carl and Denny got their plum jobs on the TEL Integration project they were keen as mustard, but now they’ve reverted to type, and the monthly review meeting in La Défense is just like being at an ADO workshop in Watford, with me making all the notes and them eating all the mints. On the bright side, the others still seem to see me as the main UK representative, sometimes even referring to C & D as “your team”, which drives the Dynamic Duo mad. Another plus point is that the Duo are going home this evening, while I’m staying on to install my reporting system upgrade at the engineers tomorrow. That means a quiet night in my room instead of having to listen to endless drunken babbling about the superiority of ALGOL-based languages. Life isn’t so bad after all.
Tuesday
Poor Didier. All he wanted was a web-based field reporting system, but he made the mistake of getting it from my former employers InterDesign A (now ceased trading). I’ve finished his upgrades now, working back from my last version to eliminate the bodges added by InterDesign’s resident bimbo, Kate. Didier, no longer looking like the Condemned Man, invites me to lunch. We sit outside in the spring sunshine, and he offers me a job - development manager, based here, and a really fabulous salary (“though still less than four months of Mike’s contract fees, eh Angie?”). Flattered, I say I’ll think about it, but in fact I won’t - I learned my lesson in Florence, and know where I belong.
Wednesday
Incredibly, Carl and Denny know about Didier’s job offer, and have thoughtfully bought me a leaving present (actually a gift-wrapped Visual Studio manual), which I return with a suitable gesture of appreciation. Mike’s also heard, and calls me in. He asks if I’m serious about going to Paris, and promptly offers me a job there, in the semi-autonomous IT services company which the TEL Consortium’s secretly planning to set up. Suddenly it all makes sense, in a typically Mike, empire-building way. By letting me do Didier’s upgrade he’s shown he can bring in new business, and with C & D now handling the core of the TEL system, the ground is ripe for a full-scale Brit takeover. I tell him I’ll think about it, and go back to the more enjoyable task of testing my DA client against the SQL Server 2K beta.
Thursday
Ed’s back from his holiday in New York, and just as brash as ever. He gets the usual response, with Denny asking if he’s wearing his Yankees cap backwards so that the peak points in the same direction as he talks. I’ve seen another side to Ed though, and I break off to help him with a nasty VB/Jet problem on Load Adjustments. He’s in Useless Ed mode (as he always is on anything except XML), and I can sense him wanting to storm off when his perfectly-coded For..Each loop fails to delete the right records. To cries of ‘schoolmarm’ from the Duo, I say that being sure your code is right is the first step to finding out whose code is wrong, and Ed, to his credit, sticks with it. We might make a developer of him yet.
Friday
I’m in first thing, but Ed’s already there, with a big grin on his face. He’s been on the KnowledgeBase and found the answer to his non-deleting VB problem (use a For..Next loop instead, and work backwards from the end of the collection - obvious, really!). He’s fixed the code too, and it works fine. His look of pride as I sign it off is quite touching. We head off for a celebratory coffee in the canteen, where Ed, to my complete astonishment, offers me a job. Speechless, I hear him say that some friends of his are starting an e-commerce house, that they’ve invited him to join them, and that he’s told them I’d make a fantastic technical director. More touched than ever, I order us two more cappuccinos and say I’ll think about it.
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Issue 19 - Contents
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Issue 1
Issue 2
Issue 3
Issue 4
Issue 5
Issue 6
Issue 7
Issue 8
Issue 9
Issue 10
Issue 11
Issue 12
Issue 13
Issue 14
Issue 15
Issue 16
Issue 17
Issue 18
Issue 19
Issue 20
Issue 21
Issue 22
Issue 23
Issue 24
Issue 25
Issue 26
Issue 27
Issue 28
Issue 29
Issue 30
Issue 31
Issue 32
Issue 33
Issue 34
Issue 35
Issue 36
Issue 37
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