Who's the most unwholesome colleague (or other individual your work has brought you into contact with)?
I once did a gig which involved the Royal Navy.
A clean-cut and wholesome bunch you might imagine - and on the whole they were.
However, RN runs some pretty obscure and ancient mainframe software, including a strange, hybrid, non-relational database.
My project needed to communicate with this unwieldy behemoth and so the RN's resident DB expert (a civilian) was duly called upon to attend a planning meeting.
My team an I were assembled in a meeting room at our own offices. RN were coming up from Portsmouth on the train and were an hour and half late for the meeting (good job there wasn't a war on).
A couple of purposeful looking chaps and a chapess strode into the room and offered apologies for their tardiness.
We sat down and I was about to begin the meeting when in shambled (and I use the word advisedly) the skankiest looking bloke I'd ever seen.
Imagine your worst 'UNIX guru' stereotype with all of his attendant hygiene and personality deficiencies, then multiply by 10.
He extended what I can only describe as a 'claw'. His finger nails were about an half an inch long and stained a shade of sunset orange by nicotine.
His long hair looked matted and his whispy, straggly beard contained specks, globs and crumbs of God knows what and his greasy, bottle-lens NHS specs completed the entire unsavory picture.
I shook his 'hand', desperately resisting the urge to wipe mine on my trousers and wondering how I could ever eat with it again.
He took his seat at the table and fished out a bashed-up sandwich and a bottle of Lilt from the old school satchel he used as a briefcase.
As he chomped and swigged, he elucidated the finer points of the obscure DB, spitting gobbets of tuna and chewed up wholemeal bread for a radius of several feet.
I was almost physically sick.
Throughout the entire performance, the rest of the RN team remained cheerfully impassive. Talk about British Grit!
My team were sat there appalled and astonished, and wondering whether this creature would suddenly stand up and reveal himself as Jeremy Beadle.
Alas no, he was for real
I once did a gig which involved the Royal Navy.
A clean-cut and wholesome bunch you might imagine - and on the whole they were.
However, RN runs some pretty obscure and ancient mainframe software, including a strange, hybrid, non-relational database.
My project needed to communicate with this unwieldy behemoth and so the RN's resident DB expert (a civilian) was duly called upon to attend a planning meeting.
My team an I were assembled in a meeting room at our own offices. RN were coming up from Portsmouth on the train and were an hour and half late for the meeting (good job there wasn't a war on).
A couple of purposeful looking chaps and a chapess strode into the room and offered apologies for their tardiness.
We sat down and I was about to begin the meeting when in shambled (and I use the word advisedly) the skankiest looking bloke I'd ever seen.
Imagine your worst 'UNIX guru' stereotype with all of his attendant hygiene and personality deficiencies, then multiply by 10.
He extended what I can only describe as a 'claw'. His finger nails were about an half an inch long and stained a shade of sunset orange by nicotine.
His long hair looked matted and his whispy, straggly beard contained specks, globs and crumbs of God knows what and his greasy, bottle-lens NHS specs completed the entire unsavory picture.
I shook his 'hand', desperately resisting the urge to wipe mine on my trousers and wondering how I could ever eat with it again.
He took his seat at the table and fished out a bashed-up sandwich and a bottle of Lilt from the old school satchel he used as a briefcase.
As he chomped and swigged, he elucidated the finer points of the obscure DB, spitting gobbets of tuna and chewed up wholemeal bread for a radius of several feet.
I was almost physically sick.
Throughout the entire performance, the rest of the RN team remained cheerfully impassive. Talk about British Grit!
My team were sat there appalled and astonished, and wondering whether this creature would suddenly stand up and reveal himself as Jeremy Beadle.
Alas no, he was for real
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