Weasles and sleaze

I am often asked (well sometimes asked (ok, occasionally asked)) how one gets a career in IT. The answer is simple: Read Classics. No I don’t mean go to Oxford or Cambridge and read Herodotus in the original, I mean read Dilbert and BOFH. Both these sources will tell you all you ever need to get ~~a head~~ ahead in IT, and if you are really lucky, you won’t even need to decode TCP packet headers.

Dilbert will teach you all you need to know about office politics, with special emphasis on IT. The main thing you want to take away from Dilbert, is how to deal with weasles, whom you will find in all avenues of employment. Weasles have traditionally gravitated towards jobs in Sales, Management and (inevitably) Government. (OK, so government is actually a superset of management, but three examples always works better than two)
BOFH is more hardcore IT, and what you need to learn from the Bastard is how to find and enjoy junkets. I was thinking of this on Friday, as I sat on the train to London. I don’t work in London, but that’s where the junket was being held, so for one day only, I moved my desk closer to (arch weasle) Tony Blair. Now, the important thing about junkets are (1) food (2) drink (3) freebies. Ok the three important thngs about junkets are… (insert reference to Monty Python here) This one scored 9/10 on the food, 2/10 on the drink (no booze) and 9.5/10 on the freebies (New Balance trainers). Oh and there was something about clever printers and photocopiers, very impressive ~~toys~~ equipment, save the company squillions, improve productivity, more professional …yadda yadda yadda… you get the gist. Didn’t have girls in skimpy bikinis handing out leaflets, but you only get that at Car Shows these days, and (to be brutally honest) most geeks wouldn’t know what to do when confronted by a skimpily dressed girl in a bikini. Just a few neck massages by (fully clothed) women.

So I stuffed myself with food, picked up a few leaflets to prove my attenance, grabbed the trainers and returned home to open a few bottles of Woodfordes ales which were obtained for me by a well-trained relative on their most recent excursion around Norfolk. Now fine ales are essential in IT as they have been proven to totally eliminate weasles (well to be precise, if taken in a large enough quantity, they will eliminiate all memory of weasles).

So there I was sitting at home, several ales tested, when I get a phone call from Nigeria. Now I don’t mean to give the impression that I’m the kinda guy who gets phoned from Nigeria every day of the week, and this wasn’t a 419. My interlocutor had actually been unfortunate enough to have experienced an encounter with some Nigerian Weasles, who had insisted that day was night and night was day. Fortunately I had my Aristotle to hand, and was able to demonstrate that the square of the hypotenuse displaced a certain volume of bullsh1t, and that good results could be obtained with a baseball bat and an industrial-strength cattle-prod.

It’s at time like these, I am grateful to be a padawan to the master.