SQL-based Office Politics

Ms Stob is mired in office politics.

Through the fug I could see that the man dozing in the armchair in the corner was really fat: 20 stone or more, as fat as a fat American occupying a whole row on a Disneyland ride. As he slept, his florid face wobbled with the hint of a snore, and the lit fag adhering to his lower lip bobbed up and down. It had quite a quarter of an inch of ash clinging perilously to its tip. To his left, an enormous canned drinks dispenser clattered its refrigerator pump loudly, as though attempting to wake the sleeper. The fat man snorted and mumbled but failed either to wake or to set fire to himself. Such are the incidental pleasures of a meeting held in the Smoking Room.

The door opened and the man who had convened the meeting and chosen the venue — and who was a quarter of an hour late — appeared. Eric Rider, senior representative of the out-sourcing experts International Old Computers and notorious ignoramus and bully, swept into the room talking on his mobile phone.

'Yeah? Well tell him that's his lookout. On my desk by 4 o'clock or he can forget it. Bye.'

Rider snapped the phone shut, sat down at my table, ignited a Marlboro Light and exhaled through his nostrils, dragon-style.

'What's this all about then?'

Rider's sidekick Wilson, a weak man who possessed an astonishing ginger toupee in lieu of a first name, had followed his master into the room and was now shuffling papers.

'Errm, Eric, it's the development group. They want to put some stuff onto the live database.'

'Oh really. They want to put some stuff on our database.' Rider stressed the words as though we had asked for something frivolous. He reached for the standard first-line defence of all bureaucrats.

'Have they filled in the form?'

I had got tired of being talked over.

'Yes, Eric, as you can see we actually put in for this three weeks ago...'

The Grand Outsourcerer silenced me with an imperious upheld hand. Brow furrowed, he began reading — obviously for the first time — the Live N2 Database Schema Revision Form that Wilson had handed him.

'Eleven gigs? You want eleven Ronnie Biggs-worth of disk? I'm not sure that Oracle can handle that much extra load.'

I opened my mouth to speak, but Wilson warned me off with a look, and I converted the movement into a more-or-less genuine coughing fit. In the corner, the fat man slept on. He now had a full inch of ash on his cigarette, a fragile arc that trembled delicately in his exhalation.

Wilson supplied the correction.

'Actually Eric this is a Sybase site. It's only the Birmingham office that runs Oracle, to do the invoicing.'

Rider was completely unfazed by his error.

'Sybase, Oracle, Excel, whatever. My point is that we can't risk stuffing the main system just because a few bright sparks in Web Development want to play with the big computers.'

This was the nub. Web Development fell outside IOC's control. Wilson, who had once spent half-an-hour in front of what he believed was a sysadmin console, intervened with a peace-making programmatic solution.

'Couldn't you write a stored procedure to do the work?'

It was his only technical remark, and he offered it at every meeting.

'We need to get these tables into the database, so everyone can see it. I don't see why this should be any problem. We have plenty of spare capacity. Besides, the Board really wants to get the X Project into production as part of the e-tailing thing...'

Rider caught a phrase as he stubbed out his butt.

'So these are the X-files are they? You want to put the X-files on our server, eh, Ms Scully? I don't think we want any aliens here, thank you very much.' He convulsed at his own wit.

Wilson had been thinking.

'But isn't this the project that has been up for some time? I'm sure Alan has showed me this on his laptop.'

What to say? I could bluff that it was running on the development server, but Wilson was bound to talk to the DBA and then I'd be found out.

'They were in such a hurry to get things going, so I went in and set up the tables myself. I was sure you wouldn't mind.'

'Wouldn't mind? You compromise the whole security of the company and you ask me if I wouldn't mind? You little vixen. You've got round that stupid little DBA. He's gone native.' He produced his mobile phone. 'Geoffrey? I have a little problem. Please get your backside up to the smoking room right now.'

There was an awkward silence while we glared at each other, finally broken by a curse from the man in the corner who had woken up and dropped the remains of his now-extinct fag on his shirt.

Wilson asked: 'So how did you get into the database?'

It's not often that one guesses a 17-letter password in one go, and I confess I had indulged in a little social engineering with the DBA, plus some HAL 9000 style watching of his keyboard movements at login. Still, you could have knocked me down with a feather when BullyingIgnoramus worked first time.

'The truth is out there,' I said mildly.