The Summer of '93

Macabre

"Did you hear about Matthew, Jim, Steve and Paul?" Dougie whispered, intriguingly.

"No?"

The IT guru of our company was called Jeff. He was a sweaty, greasy character with thinning hair on top. He always carried a bulbous spot on the end of his chin (never at the same time; they liked to alternate and must have had regular meetings to get the locality just right. I knew very well how this worked, because my skin tortured me regularly in the same way.) Whenever he came into the office it was always in a rush, he had no air of calm and he was always speaking as though our lives depended on him. I didn't like the way he always talked to my chest. The other women found him to be a letch too. The network design was appalling in our office. It was token ring Network in the office and token ring was always going down when someone removed a computer from our network, which was often. All the techies reported into Jeff. This is where Matthew, Jim, Steve and Paul come into the equation. They reported into Jeff and they either setup demonstrations of the software or built client configurations for the new hardware that was deployed when the Customer had bought it.

The team had been on their way to do a major configuration at a Customer site and were driving down with the Customer's server in the back of an estate. The Customer had all their data rebuilt on the server and it was late in the afternoon because the build had taken longer than they thought it would. The guys were racing against the clock to get it down there on time. They drove together in the vehicle as it was time dependent. The requirement was to drive down and back that day.

Dougie continued, "So the guys were thrashing their car at 90 miles an hour. They came off the motorway onto an A road. They had a head on collision with another car. The authorities reckon that car was doing the same speed. It was a mess."

"Oh My God!" I let out.

"I know."

"So what happened to them?" I didn't know them well but I saw them when I was in the office and I did have occasion to speak to them at times when I was preparing demonstrations like today. One of the cables had been a bit dodgy for this one. It was a thick cable and the connector to the cable wasn't fitting very well as the sheath of the cable was frayed. I had been told to be careful with it.

"Dead, instantly!" Doug said in a ghoulish way.

"No, you're winding me up!"

"But," his eyes glinted at the story opportunity, Doug was preparing his punchline. "when they recovered the car and brought back the kit to us, and Paul of course insisted on checking the kit, it was still working."

Paul was anything but likeable, he was the head of sales and I had to work with him, but detested him. When everyone had gone home he'd rifle through people's desks and I saw him steal someone's food out of the fridge one evening. He was hateful. Trust me to have to work with him.

"Fortunately for us, the computer kit still worked so Paul was relieved."

The thought of their cold-blooded attitude - both Dougie for revelling in a juicy macabre story to tell, at the expense of these colleagues, and Paul's typically hard-nosed approach to the silver lining of this tale, left me feeling abhorrence for them both. Doug must have thought me prissy as his face dropped because I lacked the skill to have a poker face. It was giving way now that I didn't appreciate his story. Afterwards I had to drive all the kit back to the office and I drove particularly carefully! I didn't like to follow up later and ask what was happening with families as I didn't really know them and it was a while before I was back in the office again. I never again heard it mentioned. We got a replacement IT person who joined Jeff's team. 

Over the weekend I picked up my work friend Becky, and we drove to Wakefield, for a work night out. I was mindful that it was work and work people were there. I liked the people I worked with in general, but I was acutely aware that if I put a foot wrong I would be the subject of gossip. I was out to have fun but was mindful to be guarded.