Sogger’s Blog

I’ve been in denial for 20 years - Adrian Wright saved my life and I never acknowledged it! Who is he and how did he save me?

It goes back to my first job after graduation. A northern lad, full of energy, I moved to the south where I found southern lads with more energy and work colleagues with no energy, waiting for retirement. Adrian fitted somewhere in between: he was neither overtly northern or southern and had lots of energy, very little of which was dedicated to his professional life. By day, he shared an office with a pot-smoking intellectual and a girl I thought was a lesbian until the day I left the company (she wasn’t). By night and weekend he was a keen windsurfer and he was kind enough to take me and others along with him and to give us lessons.

I had never been windsurfing before, but of course, was already an expert before I tried - “It’s just a question of balance”. Unfortunately, this is not quite true. Balance comes into it, but an understanding of wind dynamics and some technique plays a large part. I paid no heed to this - why would I need to? A few tries and I was able to go in a straight line. Learning to turn (or “tack” as us nautical types like to call it), could come later - speed is the buzz, tacking is boring.

So one evening after work, off I set. The tide is on its way out (or “ebbing” as us nautical types like to call it). Wow, I seem to be going faster than ever. Either my technique is improving or the tide is ebbing with a following wind…erm, wait a minute, that seems to be the case. Now I’m going really fast - those people on the shore are waving to me; and shrinking at an alarming rate. Actually, balancing is getting quite difficult too - the water is a bit rough (or “choppy” as us nautical types like to call it). Time to sit down and try to remember what Adrian told me about tacking. Something about not going directly into the wind, but kind of zig-zagging across it. OK, let’s give that a try. Wait a minute, what’s that ripping noise? Ah, that would be the top of the sail coming apart from the mast. I think that means that, essentially, I am floating on a plank towards Belgium…

Adrian had evidently noticed this and borrowed a board from a bystander and was balancing and tacking for all he was worth towards me. I was sat down on the board, having realised my predicament. I didn’t really fancy going to Belgium - I had work tomorrow and, in any case, hypothermia would claim me long before I got to sample any of their chocolates. So along came Adrian, like a knight in fluorescent rubber armour. He pulled alongside and told me to hold onto the back of his board. He then tacked against an ebbing tide and the wind pulling a useless rigid weight (and the windsurfing board that he was sat on) with its ripped sail dragging in the water. This was in the days before high-tech, low-weight equipment. It must have been incredibly difficult for him because we were well out into the estuary.

After a while he made it back to the shore where I was able to play the comedian, give a brief thank you and not realise just how much danger I had been in - until now. I left the company shortly afterwards and have never seen Adrian again.

So, Adrian, if Google ever brings you across this post, I would like to say thank you, and please accept my apologies for not thanking you properly at the time - put it down to long-since evaporated youthful arrogance (as us non-nautical types like to call it).

I recently received a CV from a Canadian national, Fisher Scott. Two things struck me about the CV:

1. The name seemed a bit strange: I would have thought Scott Fisher was more likely
2. The technical capabilities weren’t quite right, but it may be worth an interview anyway.

I therefore gave the guy a call and left a message asking him to give me a call for a phone interview.

It was only much later that I admitted to myself that a third thing had struck me:
3. It would be nice to have another native English speaker around the place.

The following day, I received another CV. One thing struck me about this CV:

1. It was identical in every way to Fisher Scott’s CV, except that the name of the applicant was Mohammed and the native language was marked as Arabic rather than English.

This engendered feelings of both panic and amusement and I showed it to my boss. He displayed only feelings of panic: journalists or worse still, the government, were testing us to see if we were racist employers. He asked me to call the Algerian candidate and invite him for an interview.

I have to admit that I felt like I had been stung and was against calling, and, when he arrived, I asked him if he was here as Fisher Scott or Mohammed - a low blow. When I pressed him on why he had sent two versions of his CV, his reply shocked me, “When I apply as Fisher Scott, I get about 25% replies (either positive or negative). When I apply as Mohammed, I am lucky if I get a single reply.”. When I asked him how he expected to get a positive reaction when a bogus Fisher Scott turned up, he replied, “I just hope that the interviewer can put that aside and that I will be judged purely on my technical and personal aptitudes.”. He explained that this was a common approach for north African job-seekers.

We hear often about the plight of what they call the “visible minorities” - unemployment levels for the 30-39 year-old African-descent population is running at >30%. What a terrible state of affairs and one that I had never had brought home to me so clearly.

Now I have to ask myself whether I am equally guilty of racism: would I have called the guy if the first version I received had been the Algerian version? Deep down I have to admit that I might have passed over it if it hadn’t been for the Anglo-Saxon name. As a minor consolation, I can say that this means that I might also have dismissed it if the CV had come from Monsieur Blanc. I wonder how many times my CV has been rejected because of my name? One thing for sure is that it is less often than the poor Fisher Scott.

If anything positive came out of it, it is that I have learnt my lesson. I just hope that France as a nation can do so too, but from what I see around me, I fear it won’t be any time soon.

As to the glaring question, “Did you hire him?”, the answer is, “No, he was rubbish”. And that is based on purely objective reasoning.

So we moved house recently. Top notch, no more toe-to-toe finger-pointing arguments with psychotic neighbours over the noise my children make while playing football in the garden; no more constant noise from the flats they are building only 5 metres away from my front window. Joy! Somewhat distilled however by spraining my wrist just before moving. Oops.

On the day I sprained my wrist, I decided to go to casualty (that’s ER to all my US-based readers - oh, hold on, I don’t have readers of any kind except for myself). I went to Hôpital Edouard Herriot; apparently it’s a gem of 1930’s architecture. Maybe it was a gem in the 1930s, but it’s in need of some polishing 70 years later. However, the excitement amongst the staff was palpable (not the people who had arrived with serious head trauma) - they had just installed their brand-new patient management system. I was one of the first through the system. It was so efficient they were able to send me immediately to radiology for an x-ray of my potentially fractured wrist. A 5 minute wait, I’m in-out, but unable to shake it all about ‘cos my wrist hurts like hell.
“Down to the waiting room and a doctor will be with you in 5 minutes for the diagnosis”.
There were some people there in seriously bad shape. I thought it entirely acceptable that they should pass in front of a big-jessie like me. However, the French being the French, those with injuries who I judged to be no worse than mine started complaining after waiting less than an hour - like the good, repressed, don’t-like-to-make-a-fuss, have-a-nice-cup-of-tea, type of Englishman that I am, I waited 3.5 hours before suggesting gently that I may have been forgotten.

My analysis was correct. The explanation was predictable: “new software system, glitches, you know what it’s like with that sort of thing”. Oh yes, I surely do, I’ve worked on enough software projects in the past to know exactly what it’s like. Doesn’t help when you’ve been sat in a waiting room staring at a wall for 4 hours though. Apparently, I was so fast through to radiology that the system didn’t have time to enter me into the doctor’s rota or god-knows-what. [Programmer's amongst you: maybe some kind of FIFO queue was needed - discuss].

To keep me interested (in a make-him-think-we’re-doing-something kind of way), they put me in a cubicle with a first year medical student. She reassured me by saying that she’d been asked to look at some x-rays that morning and had diagnosed a sprained wrist, missing the fact that there was a double fracture…”yours seems OK though, but hold on, what’s this…..oh no, nothing, I guess I’m just a bit paranoid after this morning, better to be safe than sorry, etc. etc.”.

So half an hour later, a real doctor arrives, spends 30 seconds looking at the x-ray, diagnoses a sprained wrist, gives me a nice splint and a letter that allows me, if I want, to have 2 weeks off work. I guess you know me by now (2 weeks off work! A nice cup of tea is all that is needed here”).

Moral of this tale: don’t keep dissing the NHS and thinking that the French health service is so great. And don’t trust software engineers.