There was something about Monday. You could just feel it. I got to the office, checked my diary, and for the first time in months I saw a meeting-free afternoon stretched out before me, full of possibility of all the productive things I might do. It wasn’t to be.

John Steinbeck described such a day in his novel Sweet Thursday:

Some days are born ugly. From the very first light they are no damn good whatever the weather, and everybody knows it. No one knows what causes this, but on such a day people resist getting out of bed and set their heels against the day. When they are finally forced out by hunger or job they find that the day is just as lousy as they knew it would be.

On such a day it is impossible to make a good cup of coffee, shoestrings break, cups leap from the shelf by themselves and shatter on the floor, children ordinarily honest tell lies, and children ordinarily good unscrew the tap handles of the gas range and lose the screws and have to be spanked. This is the day the cat chooses to have kittens and house-broken dogs wet on the parlor rug.

Oh, it’s awful on such a day! The postman brings overdue bills. If it’s a sunny day it is too damn sunny, and if it is dark who can stand it.

Half an hour in, one of our team members came over to report that we had a major leak from the sink in our coffee area that was spilling out onto the floor of our office. Our maintenance and cleaning teams quickly responded, but it eventually became clear that we had a major problem with the drain. A pump had failed, causing the build-up of wastewater, food, and drink that people had poured down the sink, presumably over many months. As the team investigated the problem, my colleague and I had to go on human traffic control duty, directing people away from the area and pointing them towards our drinks fridge. When it was clear that the drain wouldn’t return to service that day, the team put up a barrier and we got bottled water in place for staff. Working in a small office in a team that looks after both technology and facilities is nothing if not varied. But the disruption meant that I didn’t get to do the things I had planned with my free time.

Some people in the office seemed grumpy. People outside the office seemed grumpy. People on the WhatsApp group for our street were definitely grumpy. It was a grumpy kind of day, and it was good to see the back of it.

The pump was fixed and put back in place late on Tuesday afternoon, with the only impact being that for a couple of hours a chunk of our office smelled of dirty drain water again.

Aside from cosplaying as Mario, this was a week in which I:

• Had an impromptu meeting with a client-facing colleague who has been trying to get a project off the ground. It’s a small initiative that could turn into a bigger one. Before asking my team to dive in, we had a couple of meetings with colleagues in the Technology teams at our head office to see whether they were aware of the requirement, whether there was a suitable home for it, and what barriers there would be to prioritising it. The conclusion is that we will need to do the initial analysis ourselves.

• Was happy that our building contractor finally solved a long-outstanding issue with noisy airflow in one of our meeting rooms.

• Represented our Technology team at the Governance Committee for one of our legal entities.

• Spent more time talking through the proposal to make a change to our security setup, weighing up the risks versus the friction that it would impose on the organisation. One of my friends who I met via the WB-40 Podcast Signal group, a leader in cybersecurity, was extremely helpful in giving me more perspective on the problem and how we can approach it.

• Collaborated on some planning for a colleague’s visit to our office in a couple of weeks’ time. Part of his work involves leading our collaboration on Microsoft Copilot and other AI-related tools, so we are looking at how we can structure a week where people have the opportunity to get involved but we don’t bombard them with lots of meeting invites and updates.

• Caught up on my outstanding mandatory online training courses.

• Had a conversation with a colleague about approaches we could take to cleaning up and maintaining our regional intranet site.

• Met with our development team for their sprint retrospective and planning session.

• Had a random-coffee-esque meeting with one of my colleagues from our Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum.

• Bumped into a colleague who used to be the CEO of our office in Beijing. I reminded him that early in 2020, when he was stuck in London, he gave a talk in our office about how COVID-19 would eventually impact everyone. I vividly remember what he said, as only a few weeks later we headed home for the best part of two years.

• Had my monthly call with my Executive Partner at our technology research and advisory firm. I always enjoy our calls.

• Attended a webinar on our performance management process, as we are about to enter the year-end review season again.

• Had a meeting with a colleague at our sister company to demonstrate our digital signage platform. It’s hands down one of the best value for money platforms that we’ve implemented over the past few years.

• Completed a batch of psychometric-style tests as part of a career development programme that I have been enrolled in.

• Started to think that we should be actively railing against anything that presents AI in a humanoid or robotic form, like the images below. It’s lazy, and plays into the hands of the companies that want us to believe that their systems are magic boxes. I’ve seen some people say that your text should be polite when you draft a prompt for a large language model. I think we should do the opposite. Be abrupt. Be rude if you like. Keep the distinction in your head between how you talk to people and how you address the machines. I can’t stand any of this.

• Joined a meet-up hosted by FDM on Fake News, Real Risks: AI, Deepfakes and the Battle for Truth. It was the third in a series of talks that they have run on the topic of AI. Chris Paterson’s section was particularly fascinating, as he took a deep dive into disinformation in the UK. I liked the framing that Brexit is the first example of a country putting sanctions on itself, given the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of a 4% long-term reduction in productivity. If you (or, let’s say, Russia) had funded a disinformation campaign that led to the Brexit vote, it was probably a good investment to do that kind of damage to the country’s economy.

• Met with the medical consultant to review the results of the MRI scan on my shoulder. He recommended a steroid injection followed by physiotherapy. I had the injection on Thursday and it’s already feeling a bit better.

• Spent Saturday visiting my wife’s parents, taking them out for lunch and helping them with a few bits and pieces around the house.

Media

Articles

• Colleagues who have started interviewing at work gave me cause to dig out Joel Spolsky’s The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. 25 years after it was first published, it still resonates with me.
• The European Broadcasting Union and the BBC released a report that says AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time, regardless of language or territory.
• I pay £20 a month for access to ChatGPT Plus as I get utility from it, but I’ve never felt good about it. Stories like this reinforce my view. I’m not sure how long I’ll continue to pay.
• Ian Dunt wrote the most beautiful piece on the melancholy of the changing seasons and of getting older:

I increasingly have the same feeling with foreign cities. When I was in my twenties, I used to look around Madrid or Paris with a sense of wonder and excitement, imagining what life would be like if you lived there. Today, I often feel a sense of slightly pathetic yearning, because I realise that this is unlikely. Not that it couldn’t happen – it could – but it is unlikely to happen, for all sorts of work and non-work related reasons. So now, when I see someone sweeping those lovely little Spanish balconies or sitting in those French cafes where the seats face the street as if it were a cinema screen, I feel I am at a tipping point, where my life is balanced between the possibilities which have not been adopted as much as those which still remain.

• Tim Urban is back with a typically entertaining take on having young children.

Video

• Elliot Roberts’ worst-to-best review of Ringo Starr’s solo work, with a whole bunch of side-quests to look at other aspects of his life, is an absolute masterpiece. Despite considering myself a very big Beatles fan, I’ve never heard a Ringo album before. I might just give one of the top four a go sometime. Boy, do I love a deep dive into pop culture. I can’t wait to find out what he chooses to work on next.

Web

• ChatGPT Atlas has just turned up, and my first thought is ‘privacy and security nightmare’. I can’t imagine using a web browser where my data is, more than likely, exposed to OpenAI on a constant basis. AI blogger Simon Willison agrees. David Gerard thinks it may help OpenAI to scrape hard-to-reach content. It’s fair to say that I won’t be using it.

Books

• Nearly finished with Jon Savage’s The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979).

Next week: Medical checks.