Back to the shop floor
With the Witham peloton heading east for the first time in a while, I decided I could be bothered to venture out on a Wednesday evening.
After riding all of 10 miles to get there, I was even almost on time. I arrived at the Kings Head in Tollesbury to find Dirk Emery, NikNak, Huggy, Oz Clarke, Jilly Goolden, Roald Amundsen, Hotblack and the Lynx all sweltering inside in their winter clobber.
Like the true executive he is, Dirk had decided to spend some time slumming it back at the coal face and was our beverage procurement operative for the evening. Guys like Dirk don't just hide in a lab in pursuit of POCaaS, they get their hands dirty in the real world to find solution opportunities and it is fascinating to watch them in action. No one could accuse Dirk of micromanagement in avoidance of failure given the freedom he allows our usual BPO but you could see he had taken a deep dive into his chaos pool and was prepared to utilise extreme proactivity to achieve customer success. His approach was to disrupt the MEMWNS ecosystem working front to back and it was a masterclass of management.
First up was the ordering process - boom, out with the Kitty Kitty notepad and in with an electronic ordering system operating in real time. Finances - hell yeah, there was no purse, just cash on the table providing transparent and instant auditing for our CFO. Just in time ordering - as if, it's 2018 not 2003 and Dirk's AI-based system was humming away in the background constantly updating and teaching his delivery and destination spread sheet with data on average supping times, known preferences, previous untappd entries and other key factors to provide outputs based on need - "Ted, it's 9.48 and I've brought you a Suffolk Gold". The system easily coped with arch-disruptors Jilly and Oz when they suddenly decided to try two different types of wine and then move on to shorts - zap it was done. Final round, exactly the right money left to cover it and job done for Dirk.
In some ways it lacked the personality and charm of the old approach but you can't stand in the way of efficiency. The Hustler is in for an interesting appraisal before his re-training begins.
While this was unfolding in front of us we managed to sample St Peter's Suffolk Gold, Ridley's Rite, Calvors' American Red, Young's Special and in a Quaffers' Choice Award winning return from the 1970's...McEwans Export.
Some people discussed burying a 30 foot copper pole into a bucket of water in a concrete floor to make an amplifier work while the rest of us mused on love and life.
The ride home was definitely cold enough but with a full moon and no wind it was perfectly pleasant.
