I was privileged enough to have an office, one of a set arrayed along the side walls of the office, for I was a manager, in charge of “test coordination,” as we called it. I hung up my jacket and dug a bottle of Evian water from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I booted up my PC and waited for it to download my intranet mails. I riffled through the snail mail: just a few flyers from software utilities vendors.

Vivian Cave walked into the office next to mine. She was late thirties, perhaps forty, a midheight graying blonde. She spotted me through the glass walls that separated us, gave me a half smile, and raised an invisible glass to her lips. Drink later? I waved back. Sure.

The PC screen speckled with icons. I found a total of thirty-two mails, after four working days away. Just eight a day? And most of them were routine stuff about Internet viruses, an offer to sell an unused snorkel set, and a mighty eleven mails with soccer score updates sent to the rest of the office by one diligent observer working late during a European Champions League match. But nothing from my line manager, or the software development project managers whom I was supposed to work with.

No work for George today. I knew I should launch myself into the online reports, or storm around the office setting up meetings. With a role like mine, fighting for work was part of the job.

I kicked the door closed, sat down, and sipped slowly at my Evian.

I’d been here three years. It wasn’t the first job of its kind I’d taken. I’d drifted into positions like this much as I’d drifted into my career in software development in the first place.

Leaving school, fairly bright but hopelessly unfit, I’d had vague TV21 dreams of becoming a scientist—an astrophysicist maybe, probing the far reaches of the universe, or a space engineer, building and controlling rockets and spacecraft. I was bright enough for college, but a few “down-to-Earth” harangues from my dad the accountant had made me see the wisdom of keeping my options open.

I got a place at Warwick University, where I read math. It was a bright, friendly place, the math faculty at the time was sparky and innovative—the home of then-trendy catastrophe theory—and I soon found myself forgetting the ostensible reasons I’d gone there. Working my way tidily through the groves of axioms, postulates, and corollaries, I quickly hit my intellectual limits, but I discovered in myself a deep appreciation of logic and order.