Bill and Ben

I was NOT called Penny Lane after the Beatles song. I was called Penny Lane before the Beatles song. Oh, how I hated that song. It was popular just when I was doing my A levels, and wherever I went lots of the boys whistled it.

My full name is actually Penelope Louise Joyce Lane. My parents, in small town India, had never heard of PLJ, so they can’t be blamed for my nicknames. As soon as I started school in England, I was Pure Lemon Juice, which mutated to Sourpuss as we got older.

In the British community in Evansganj – well, the poor British community, anyway, I don’t know about the toffs – a popular way of forming a pet name for a child was to run the first and middle names, or short forms of them, together. So Philippa Elizabeth Ann was Pippa-Liz, and I was Penny-Lou. Nice, affectionate names. There weren’t any penny-in-the-slot public toilets in Evansganj, nobody had ever heard of such a thing. The smallest coin in India in those days was one pice, so they’d have been pice-in-the-slot anyway, if they’d existed. Whether Patrick had cottoned on more quickly to the English meaning of my Evansganj pet name than the rest of the family, I don’t know, but I do know that it was he who told children at school. So then I was Penny-Loo as well, but the teachers decided to call a halt to that. It went underground for a while, and finally disappeared.

During my undergraduate years, my best friends were William Ackroyd and Benjamin Bernstein. Bill and Ben. With my size and shape it was inevitable that I became Little Weed. Ho hum. I didn’t mind though, it was always used affectionately.

We three were members of the University Rock Climbing Club. Although my reach wasn’t as long as anyone else’s, I was light and supple and very wiry which more than made up for it in most situations. I gained the respect of a lot of pretty tough blokes. There were a few girls in the club, but Little Weed was the only one who could climb with the best of the blokes.

In our second year, the three of us joined the Potholing Club as well, and there I was at a huge advantage.

I enjoyed those years. Nearly every weekend rock climbing or potholing meant I had to work extra hard during the week to keep up with my studies, but I managed. It probably taught me the discipline that I’d never really needed at school, and probably thereby actually helped my academic work.

I’ve remained friends with Bill and Ben ever since.

They started an engineering company together several years after we’d all finished our PhDs. Believing my maths to be better than theirs, they asked me if I was interested in joining them. At first, they didn’t really have enough of my kind of work to keep me busy anywhere near full-time, so I acted as a part-time consultant and continued teaching in school, which I’d taken up after a few years doing research.

May 1992

One of the jobs I did for them involved several visits to one of their clients, Pericor Engineering, and on the fourth visit I was called in to see the personnel manager, Bob. He said, “You’re only working with Ackroyd and Bernstein part time, aren’t you? How would you like to come and work full-time for us?”

I said I couldn’t do that without consulting Bill and Ben first, and that I’d probably want to continue working part-time for them. Bob pointed to the phone, and then said, “or would you prefer to talk to them privately?”

I wasn’t sure about leaving teaching anyway, which I really enjoyed and felt fulfilled in, but the money was too tempting. I rang Bill from home that evening, and the following day I accepted Bob’s offer. I was free to take unpaid leave to work with Bill and Ben whenever they needed me. It seemed perfect.

It turned out that it wasn’t perfect at all, but the money was a lot better than teaching, there’s no denying that.

June 1994

“We’d like you to do a special project for us. It’s probably quite a challenge, but we know you like a challenge.”

“Fire away. I’m all ears.”

“It’s really mainly for Bob. You explain it, Bob.”

“You know how Pericor keeps everything on file, for legal reasons. Every version of every file created in the company, every file downloaded from elsewhere, every email sent or received, every website visited?”

“I didn’t actually know that, but you don’t surprise me. I can see how some of that information could be very useful in various legal battles. There’s an obvious problem with it, of course: it’s an awful lot of stuff to trawl through for the crucial nugget of information that you need. I imagine that it’s all pretty much unstructured. It’s hard to see how you would structure such a database, or at least, how you’d structure it in any very helpful way.”

“That’s right, and that’s where your project comes in. What we want is a program to do the trawling for us, a program that we can give a question to, that then goes off and searches all the records for everything relevant it can find.”

Since Bob was the personnel manager, I wondered why this was his project. Well, not really. I had by then learnt a little bit about company politics. But I didn’t say anything about that.

“A general one? That’s a very tall order. It’d be hard enough trawling for answers to specific, predetermined questions that the programmer knows the meaning of. A program to analyse a question written in plain English by someone who doesn’t know what the program can and can’t understand, is a problem of a different order. I don’t see how I can expect the user to learn a special formal language to write the query in, but without that, I don’t see this as a feasible project for me. Not even if you let me have a small team.”

“You’re making more of this than you need to. We can give you a list of specific questions up front.”

“That means I’d have to be trusted with prior information about legal issues. That’s a pretty big responsibility.”

What I was being asked to do is available off-the-peg today of course. Much more than what I was being asked to do, in fact. But it wasn’t in 1994.

“Aren’t you ready for that level of responsibility? Perhaps we’ll have to find someone else to do the project.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t. All I was wondering was whether you were ready to give me that level of responsibility.”

“If we can’t find someone to write a program that can analyse a query written in plain English – and we’d already considered that, and realized it was going to be very hard – we’ve got to give someone that responsibility. Jim said he thought you were probably the girl for the job.”

Girl. I was forty-five. But I didn’t say anything about that either. People tended to forget. I didn’t look it.

“I’m flattered. There’s another issue of responsibility. I need to know what the data’s like. As I said, I imagine it’s pretty much unstructured. That is, its structure – everything’s got one, really – is presumably unplanned and a bit random. The only way I can get a handle on the way it’s organized is to actually look at it, which means I’ll be seeing a lot of confidential stuff. That’s an even bigger responsibility than knowing what your questions are. Probably.”

“Yes. We were aware of that, too, but we know you’re a trustworthy member of the team.”

“There’s another little niggly thing. You said, ‘every website visited’. Are the actual contents viewed kept on record, or just the URLs? If you only keep URLs, they may not connect to anything any more, or they may connect to something that’s different from what they connected to when they were originally visited.”

“We keep copies of what was actually downloaded to the users’ computers. And the URLs.”

“Okay. So... give me a list of your specific questions, and access to the database, and I’ll see what I can come up with. Actually, I could do better than that. Give me a short list of typical questions, nothing that is actually a legal issue at the moment or in the foreseeable future, and I’ll think about how I can restructure the database to make it easier to answer questions of that general kind. That is, restructure what we’ve got now, and redesign the way the data is gathered so that it drops straight into my new structure.”

“Now you’re giving us a tall order. How about one question at a time?”

“Well, that doesn’t give me much to go on, to decide how best to restructure the data. But it sounds as though you have a specific query you want answered right now. In itself, that’s a much easier problem; but it doesn’t help much with preparing for future queries.”

“Don’t worry too much about future queries. We’ll cross those bridges when we come to them.”

“Okay, so what’s your specific query?”

Bob explained it.

“So what you’re saying is that you want me to write a program that trawls through all the records, all the emails, everything else it can find, relates it to each employee, and compiles a database of people’s foibles – that you can use against them when you want to get rid of them?”

When you want to get rid of them for some other reason that you’d rather not make public – but I thought I’d leave that unsaid, too.

“I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but in a nutshell, yes, that’s pretty much it.”

“I’m sorry to say that I’ve got a pretty serious foible myself. I’ve got scruples. What’s worse, I’ve got an infectious form of the disease. I think you’re probably going to have to fire me.”

And I’ll see you in court if you do, I thought. I wished I’d had a voice recording of the meeting.

I’m not sure about the morality of taking voice recordings of meetings covertly. I don’t think they’d have had any scruples about doing it themselves, if they’d had any reason to want to, but that’d be no excuse for me to have done it. Does the very fact that it was a meeting between figures in authority and a subordinate give the subordinate an automatic moral right to record proceedings covertly? I’d certainly defend someone else’s right to do it. But I’m not sure I’d claim that right myself.

They got Geoff to do the deed. They never got a chance to fire me, because I resigned first. I’d started looking for a new job with a different company straight away, and was lucky enough to get a job with Ladoca Ltd. pretty quickly, before Geoff had even finished the project.

I’d have loved to have sued Pericor for constructive dismissal, but it would have been a difficult case to prove without getting Geoff to give evidence. I know he didn’t like Pericor much, but I don’t think he’d have been prepared to take the risk of giving evidence against them. I couldn’t have brought myself to ask him anyway.

And it probably wouldn’t have been a good career move for me, either. Not really. Bill and Ben still didn’t really have enough of my kind of work to keep me busy full-time.

It wasn’t long before they did though, and I only worked at Ladoca for three years before leaving to move up to Edinburgh to join them. I worked with them until I retired last year.

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On to 1st India Visit