I’m writing to tell you about yesterday’s Department Team Meeting. It was a traumatic event, and my psychiatrist tells me that talking to my friends about it will help me to eventually come to terms with what happened. Our office resembles those of an accounts department in 1982. The walls are covered with thickly over painted textured paper, the Styrofoam ceiling tiles are mostly without water stains, and a selection of plastic desk fans tells the keen observer that we don’t have air conditioning.

For the team meeting, the office huddles into the recently constructed break-out area, a small oasis of off-mauve sofas and coffee tables at one end of the room. Most have to stand, packed against the walls, some stand in the corridor nearby unable to see or hear anything but loyally pretending they are taking part. Our Cardiff team get video conferenced in, vague forms on a projector screen. If they try speaking, their voices come through like something from the other side, a kind of lo-fi digital seance.

At some point in her life, my boss read a large book — perhaps several books — called “How to force yourself to become a senior executive”. She starts by praising a number of team members on their successes over the last month. Gustavo (shy, bearded, Catalan) has created a video exemplifying our corporate values, which Gustavo, and the rest of us, are then forced to watch. It’s actually pretty impressive, and I wonder what Gustavo might do, given a subject like “The unbearable lightness of being” or even “Breaking the Habit — Bad Nuns, Good Times”. As it was “Challenging Together for Excellence” drew only polite applause, and will almost certainly not go viral on YouTube.

Others are praised too. Someone in Cardiff is praised, but doesn’t really know, and couldn’t really tell us even if they did. Our latest team members are introduced “Hi, I’m Terry, as you can probably till I’m South Ifrican, I’m looking forward to gitting to know you all” and we move on to presentations from the team. In the interests of fairness, all six members of one of the development teams are being given five minutes each to talk about the great work they are doing. To an impartial observer, that may sound like 30 minutes well spent improving communication skills and sharing knowledge. It feels like an eternity of suffering, when you’re actually there.

Naisha is at least cheerful. Her slides are snappy and clear, her Keralan lilt is restful, if wholly incomprehensible. The sun streams through the windows. Each slide has exactly four bullet points, the last one being a summary of the first three. Every third slide is itself a summary of the previous two, and, understanding that her accent is challenging for her audience, Naisha makes sure to rephrase each bullet point twice. “Here we are saying that the BDD is the way to ensure business engagement in the relevant issues, by which I mean to say that if we use the BDD approach, the business people will be more engaged only in those issues which are most relevant.” In total Naisha says everything six times, and I am left playing a kind of bullet-point Russian roulette, praying that the next point might actually contain new information, and so put me out my misery.

The rest of the team proceed, politely and awkwardly, one east-of-Suez accent after another, delivered with robotic earnestness into the carpet tiles. I’d jump out of the window, but it’s painted shut. There are no questions from the audience. The standees start to lean, and shift from foot to foot. Sighs, short and infrequent are exhaled, and each man fixes his eyes before his feet*. David says something interesting about the correct approach to documenting software projects. I consider speaking up in support of this, but by now everyone is lost in their own private sorrow. Like men in the trenches, having stopped asking why, but simply waiting for the end of the waiting.