(cue thunder, and sound of coffin lid creaking open)

Having been free of BodgeCo's evil clutches for almost a full decade now, some long-suppressed memories still pop into John's beleagured head on occasion, like unwelcome stains on an expensive pair of trousers. Here are the latest ones...

The Sinister Mrs Griffiths

Though feasibly a nice lady in her spare time, Mrs Griffiths adorned her workday with an overly fragile temper, stern 'so challenge me, I think not' glares and sudden emotional outbursts. These outbursts usually involved a situation of some sort. Basically Mrs Griffiths had taken "situation comedy" and defined her very own sub-genre, "situation horror".

On a particularly fraught and busy Wednesday morning, Mrs Griffiths decided to brew up a small amount of coffee in the kitchen, just enough for herself. Rather than waiting the minute or two required for the water to pass through the percolator, she wandered off for twenty minutes and became embroiled in an angry phone call with a supplier. Meanwhile Mark Poseur (a large-browed programmer in his mid-twenties, who bore a startling resemblance to Frasier Crane, with roughly the same amount of wispy hair) wandered into the kitchen, saw the percolator with its thin sliver of coffee, and rubbing his hands together thought: "Wooooowww!! Just enough coffee left for me! Am I in luck this morning or what!"

As he gleefully poured the fresh coffee into his cup (mistakenly thinking it to be the dregs from a full pot), Mrs Griffiths stomped back in, saw her coffee being "stolen", and went ballistic.

"I made that for myself!" she literally screamed. "There was just enough for me, for my morning coffee, for myself. I can't believe I just wandered off for a minute, and came back, and you swooped in and took my coffee, which I brewed up just for myself! For me!"

Panicking, Poseur offered her his coffee cup, stammering: "I'm sorry, I didn't realise! I had no idea..."

Brushing away his proffered sacrifice, Mrs Griffiths, almost in tears, screeched: "Honestly, some people are so selfish! Why can I not just make my own coffee, in peace, without all these... these vultures swooping in?"

Not long after John had joined BodgeCo, he overheard a telephone conversation between Mrs Griffiths and an insurance administrator:

"Yes," she snarled, "there was a scrape on our car. Now, I need to get a report sorted out showing our protected no-claims. Now you were supposed to send that to me... days ago... yes. What are you talking about? You silly little man, if I had received it then I would have known. Do you think I wouldn't have known? Well surely you can tell me right now what I need to know... what's that? What do you mean, you don't have my file in front of you? Well what are doing, calling me up and bothering me when you don't even have my file? None of your lip, young man, I don't CARE who called whom. Now, I want you to tell me... yes... oh, that thing you sent us yesterday? Well, I would hardly call that a report, with its... no! I do not think so. This funny little slip of paper with its little squiggles and funny numbers? Well... I suppose I shall have to make do with that then. Well, thank you very much... for nothing. Goodbye!!" She then slammed the phone down, panting hard, whilst John cowered terrified in the corner.

Evidently Mrs Griffiths was something of a visionary, way ahead of her time. She had perfected the art of stern bitching, almost ten years before Anne Robinson would become famous for it.

Stimpy's Big Brother

Speaking of visionaries, Stimpy had stumbled upon the seeds of the popular Big Brother television programme, again almost ten years before a houseful of talentless, slack-jawed wastes of space would be filmed splashing about naked in a jacuzzi then being made outrageously famous for thirty seconds of their aimless, self-serving lives.

Stimpy's vision was on a slightly less grand scale, though distinctly sinister. He wanted to introduce some staff monitoring software so that he could instantly track his employees' wherabouts. He had a "vision" of a Big Brother-style software program that monitored all his staff going about their daily business. The watered-down "reality" design that he ended up with consisted simply of a small software program residing on each person's PC, in which the employee must quickly type in what they are about to do for the next 5 minutes.

The poor downtrodden employee could select from various categories, such as:

 * going to the toilet (with "polite" attributes for "short/long-term stay");
 * going to the kitchen (with attributes for tea or coffee because tea takes marginally longer to make);
 * going to lunch (+ projected wherabouts in case the person has a phone call - this was when mobile phones were just almost poised to become ubiquitous, but were still too expensive to issue to every member of staff).

Stimpy decided to write the software in-house, as he couldn't find any third-party apps that exactly fitted his slightly unorthodox requirements. And of course he allocated John the task of writing the software.

John had to wonder why he should want to create something that would instantly remove his own personal freedom
and sense of dignity (what little of it remained at BodgeCo). It was sort of like taking someone into the woods in the middle of the night, and telling them to dig their own grave "otherwise I'll shoot you".

John and Stimpy had several meetings about the new project, during which John repeatedly maintained what a bad idea he thought it was, not least because it would kill company morale and convince people that the Griffiths family had Japanese
grandparents. Outright refusing to write the software did not seem to be denting Stimpy's enthusiasm. He had sketched out some screen designs for his personal power-management client program, which included a graphical representation of the office, complete with toilet cubicles and anatomically correct "little computer people" depicting the exact wherabouts and projected actions of all the office staff.

John guessed that he could probably just go ahead and write the program - no-one would actually use it, after all. The system would rely on everyone's goodwill to maintain it and keep their wherabouts up-to-date, every minute of the day.
Luckily, the following morning, a local cinema suddenly requested that some "urgent" reporting tools be written straightaway, and Stimpy jumped to it. So the Big Brother project was to be delayed for at least a couple of weeks - after which Stimpy simply forgot all about it.

Stimpy's Big Book of Management

Stimpy had decided that it was high time he learned how to actually be a manager, and to do "good management things". His good-natured earnestness never failed to surprise John and Malcolm, who encouraged him to "do the right thing" and at least try to become a good manager. So Stimpy ran out to the local bookshop, and came back proudly bearing his new possession, a book called "Effective Management: Running a Company in the Digital Age" (or something like that).

Two days later, John went into Stimpy's office, and saw that the book had indeed fulfilled an important need for Stimpy: it was propping up his monitor!!

The Nightmare Continues

Next - John's hellish time at Scatterlogic...

In the meantime, we're now publishing True Stories from other people. Be sure to send us your nightmarish tales - tech-related or otherwise - and share your pain with the rest of us.

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