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It’s DEJA VU: Customer forgets to tell us about essential feature AGAIN

Been there, seen it, haven't done it

You've been here before, Dabbsy. No, really

Sure enough, I am on the correct floor but I don’t recognise it. That is, it looks familiar in that déjà vu kind of way but nothing is quite the same as how it was just a week ago. They have built some new meeting rooms, taken down others and mucked about with the partitions.

I turn back to the unfortunate woman still cowering in the lift and ask, leeringly, “Do you have the decorators in?” while half-remembering that this might be a euphemism for something. She reaches slowly into her handbag but I have already walked off onto the main floor before she can retrieve her pepper spray.

The decorators haven’t just changed a few things, they have all but rebuilt the layout of the entire floor. Storage rooms containing spare kit have vanished without trace. Where there was open-plan space to chuck a football around when working late at night, there is now a cluster of glass-walled meeting rooms.

They have even built a kind of zig-zag corridor that snakes around the newly constructed plaster walls in such a convoluted way that getting from one side of the floor to the other now requires the assistance of Google Maps and involves at least one restroom visit and two passport checks.

On the way, I come across two lost schoolchildren, a withered Japanese man who thought the war was still on, and a perky girl with ruby slippers skipping along with a dog and three freaks who look like they work in the advertising department.

I should not be surprised, since this particular company likes to rebuild its own office interiors on a disconcertingly frequent basis. They employ builders to come in overnight so that, from one day to the next, the landscape of the workplace would change, to the delight (and dismay) of staff the following morning.

It must be surreal to walk into your site of employment and have to find out where everything is all over again, on a daily basis. I imagine there must be a grey-clad Stranger somewhere orchestrating the nightly changes, erecting walls and routing corridors like in Dark City, except without Riff-Raff to lead you through the Crystal Maze afterwards.

Let the tuning commence!

Let the tuning Commence!

When I finally locate my client, he is looking glum. For years, despite his status as a company director, he has resisted pressure to have a room of his own, preferring to sit with his teams on the main floor. They tried to build an private office for him on at least two occasions but he would simply dodge the builders, shuffle his desk further across the floor and fill the empty room with boxes containing old keyboards, broken printers and his bicycle.

Eventually, it seems, they pushed him quite literally into a corner from which he could no longer escape, like some cruel game of human chess, and had an office erected around him as he sat there. The builders were still finishing the wallpaper and sealing the glass as I arrived.

He tells me the development project launch date has been pushed back again. Apparently, during user acceptability testing, the customer suddenly remembered something jolly important that they’d forgotten to mention at the start of the project, some 18 months ago. As I understand it, the customer was only vaguely apologetic and insisted that the problem be fixed before go live. And it’s the fifth time they have done it.

This is quite funny because almost exactly the same thing has just happened with one of my other clients. In much the same way, this other customer keeps coming up with demands for new functions that they themselves didn’t realise they wanted, so the project gets put back time and time again.

Hmm, now I’m thinking about it, it has happened several times with all of them, all in their marble-chrome-carpet-tile offices, all in recent weeks. It’s like déjà vu, ho ho. Very funny.

I tell my client in his new glass-and-plaster coffin how funny I think it is, especially since I am about to go on holiday. Oddly, he does not find it amusing at all and, if anything, begins to look even more glum as he picks up his phone and mutters what I’m vainly hoping is a voice password but isn’t.

“Lock the doors.”

Déjà vu: it happens when they change something. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, eh? ®

Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He is impressed with the unerring uniformity of every office refurbishment experience, especially how it predictably leads, without fail, to 27 employees on a bench somewhere in the office being forced to share two power sockets and a single Ethernet port.

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