8 February 2016, 3 pm
And finally today, the VeePee is taking me out for afternoon tea. Perhaps he is being nice to me to prevent me questioning his international liaison plans in too much detail. Or perhaps he wants to make sure I don’t just disappear off into the sunset the minute I step down from the presidency (too bad: I will be on the first plane out, and will be sure to email him the photos). As we leave, the CIPA team are beginning a training session on the new database. In one sorry room, Mr Davies, Mr Lampert, Unlucky Gary and New Isabelle (Mr Lampert’s new communications officer) sit hunched over their individual workstations, phones to their ears, pulling despairing faces and sighing. Unlucky Gary has his eyes closed, as though trying to block out the trauma. Mr Lampert appears to have invented a whole load of new shorthand symbols. There is steam coming out of Mr Davies’s ears, even without a kettle anywhere nearby. They are supposed to be learning how to use the database to do whizzy new things and how to get it to communicate with the whizzy new website. They would also like to get it to deliver up the data it purportedly houses, in a form that people can use to, for example, write to their members, or process subscription payments. These last are not in themselves whizzy new things, they are just ordinary old things that databases are supposed to do, and our database’s failure to play ball is what is causing the sighing and the steaming today. The VeePee and I beat a hasty retreat. This may sound callous but in the circumstances, it is probably in CIPA’s best interests. And we would not want to arrive at the posh afternoon tea place picking bits of database out of our hair.
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