Let me PLUG that up there, love. It’s perfectly standaAAARGH!

Burn baby burn, kitchen inferno

Consultancy. Nice work if you can get it

Questions as to what this meant, how it would be implemented, what software was required and whether it really merited paying a consultant £1,500 per day (in the late 1990s, too) were dismissed with a wave of the hand.

It was like a brain disease had broken out that affected only managing directors, leaving the rest of us unscathed. XML would solve all our problems, apparently, while saving the Earth from global warming and helping join all nations into an era of peace and understanding.

Of course, within weeks, the massive gaps in the plan become as obvious as the massive gap between the IT bullshitter’s ears. Where is the content coming from? How does it get tagged? Where is it going? How does it get there? How come no-one noticed that no off-the-shelf software supports any of this and so we’ll have to develop our own at additional vast expense?

After two months, the bullshitter sidles off with his suitcase of cash, ready to dupe the next gullible customer, and unceremoniously dumps his incoherent digital publishing project on yours truly to sort it out.

This, then, leads to that second problem: being forced to make things that don’t work together, work together. Interfacing. And to do this, you end up making the kind of compromises that would make a cowboy builder look like a German health and safety inspector.

Can we round-trip the data? No, but we can hire some work experience elves to make it look like we have. Is validation giving us a problem? Let’s fiddle the system so it sidesteps the DTDs.

If you have ever owned a house for more than a year, you will have seen this kind of thing in action. You see it every time an electrician, gas engineer or handyman turns up to fix a problem and slaps his forehead in stunned amazement at the insanity of the previous occupants.

I remember in my first year trying to unblock a rainwater gutter at the front of my house and, having dug down to see if the drain had broken, discovered that there was no drain at all and that the guttering pipe simply poked directly into the solid clay under the paving stones.

You can imagine what went on in the builder’s mind: “Damn, the nearest drain is two feet to the left of my guttering pipe. Never mind, I’ll tidy it up so it looks nice.”

A close look at the kitchen wall reveals that there used to be a convenient doorway into the dining room, but the previous owner had walled it up. Now the kitchen opens uniquely and pointlessly into the hallway by the front door. Perhaps he was running a soup kitchen for homeless people who rang his doorbell. Who knows?