The Elephant House

Note: I wrote this piece about 6 years ago, but somehow it got lost. I found it again today and thought it was worth revisiting.

At the station I spot the friendly barista who works in the local coffee shop where I like to sit and write. He seems delighted whenever he sees me in the shop and he always makes some kind of conversation. Once or twice under time pressure he has made what he thought was a sub-standard coffee for me, and brought over a replacement later when the pressure has subsided, by which time I’ve already drunk most of the faulty coffee. The fault is purely cosmetic but it obviously matters to him, and replacing the coffee pleases him. It pleases me too.

The Barista is standing on the other platform which I don’t think is used at this time of day. I turn to check the sign but he calls over that I am on the right platform. He walks over to my platform and waits as I buy my ticket from the machine. I have to squat to see the little screen where I enter my PIN. The barista has close cropped hair. He tells me he’s just finished work and he’s going home. He lives near Maidenhead. He asks me where I am going and I tell him I’m going to London to see some friends play in the London Jazz Festival.

“I have been in London only once. The boss made a party and we all went. I have been here seven months. I have been to England before but that was in Plymouth.”

“…”

“…”

It’s 15:10 and the light is already fading. Neither of us can think of any more to say. Our relationship revolves around him making coffee for me, and me appreciating it. Sometimes he makes sympathetic gestures when I can’t get my favourite corner table, or looks pleased when I do get it. Beyond that we don’t have anything in common. I guess that’s one reason why most people who serve in shops pretend not to see you if you pass them in the street.

“Ah, the train is arriving.”

We walk along the platform. The barista falls behind. I feel the faint familiar worry that the train might overrun the buffers and burst through the wall and into the road. It’s happened before, but after it happened for a second time the buffers were moved a little further from the road and beefed up. The train stops without hitting the buffers.

On the train someone is reading the Daily Mail. WE SHOULD BOMB SYRIA SAY 60% OF BRITONS. The train terminates at Maidenhead where the door opens to reveal a small boy in school uniform holding another small boy in a headlock and screaming in his ear. It’s only play-fighting, so I resist the temptation to pretend to be a teacher and to yell STOP THAT. Instead I give them a death stare over the top of my specs but they don’t die, or even notice.

On the train to Paddington the first-class section has been downgraded so that anyone can sit there. There’s a table on which someone has scratched their initials. I write in a notebook until the train gets to Hayes, where three business people politely ask if they can join me. I can’t write with people watching so I put the notebook away and look out of the window. By the track in the gloom is a long narrow brick building with a corrugated roof. Yellow incandescent light shines from a window and the doors and window frames are painted regulation blue. You see these buildings on the edge of industrial estates next to railway tracks and to get there you’d have to take a complicated route that few people know through sidings and derelict carriages and strange pieces of railway engineering machinery and stacks of ancient canisters containing toxins that should have been destroyed long ago. Inside I imagine an ancient man pouring strong brown tea into a stained mug and using an encrusted teaspoon to add three spoons of sugar from a tin. Maybe the corrugated roof tiles contain asbestos.

These places are remnants from a time long gone. When I left university I took a job I didn’t really want near here in a remnant a bit like this. It was not far from the tracks and had the same brick construction and blue paint and corrugated roof. It was called The Elephant House because it had a pair of doors large enough to bring elephants in. Inside, the office part was huddled at one end, and the rest was a cavernous space where sometimes lonely looking radar sets were wheeled in for test. The place had been painted in the same drab colours since it was built in the 30s. There were filing cabinets and a security cupboard with a combination lock. You had to clear your desk before leaving every day, and all papers had to be locked away.

The war had finished 30 years before but you wouldn’t know, looking at most of the people who worked here. Joe, who was the boss, wore a handlebar moustache that was waxed at the tips (which would look proper hipster right now) and drank his tea out of a ‘tache cup, which had little wings inside designed to keep the ‘tache out of the tea. He spoke in the clipped accent of an RAF pilot. Another colleague, Zach, had flown for a Polish RAF squadron, and walked with a limp. I learned from Zach that the best cheese smells the worst. There was Alf, a short, dapper chap who loved sailing and had the deep tan and the blazer with brass buttons to match, and was given to outrageously racist and strangely self-referential statements about people with brown skins. On my first day Alf told me that as the office junior it was my job to make the tea. I refused and there was a row, until Joe called for a bit of serendipity. I had to look it up when I got home. I never did make the tea for them.

Because I hadn’t thought I would need a job, I hadn’t paid much attention to job interviews, treating them mainly as a source of income by telling them that I’d come up by train from my parents’ house in Manchester and claiming the return train fare when in fact I’d been staying in a flat in London. As a result I had one job offer and this was it. So I took it. The brochures and the interviews made the job look a little glamorous to my innocent eyes, but the glamour died the moment I saw the Elephant House and the people who worked there. The interviews had been held in bright, modern buildings where minions brought reasonable coffee and nice biscuits. This was the front of house. But as soon as I got the job I was in the back office, to which the pretty things of life never percolated. I didn’t learn, and I remained mesmerised by what I thought was the romance of the work place for several years. I particularly remember an ad in a computer comic for software engineers that showed a man with his coat collar turned up and an attaché case, running for a plane. I wanted to be that guy. Not long after I was that guy and I hated it.

My job in the Elephant House was to develop software to estimate the Circle Of Error of a missile tracking radar that was under development. I knew nothing about radar or ballistics and my programming skills were rudimentary. I had taught myself Fortran in the last year of Uni (the lectures were so boring that I had been unable to stay awake). I wasn’t given any training and had no idea where to start.

A colleague told me I should look in the Journal of the Eye Tripoli. Whatever that was. At the library I discovered that this did not refer to a city in the Middle East, but to the Institute Of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. I found that there was something called the Radar Equation, which had about 20 variables and somehow contained the answer to the question I was supposed to be answering. I hacked together a program that allowed you to type in a bunch of these variables with fancy names like azimuth and elevation, and returned a value for the Circle Of Error. Given my lack of skills and minimal understanding of the problem, the output of the program could only be thought of as a work of fiction. This was not a case of what is now called Impostor Syndrome, I was an actual impostor. It never occurred to me to go to Joe and tell him that I was floundering. And it clearly never occurred to Joe or anyone else to look at what I was doing to check it was correct, or to supervise me in any way. I guess this was because no-one else in the place understood programming. Anyway, it didn’t seem to matter. Alf was the main user of the code. I found him one day sitting at a teletype bashing in numbers and scribbling in a notebook, so I carried out my first ever piece of what is now called user research.

“What are you doing, Alf?”

“I’m holding all but one of the parameters constant, and plotting performance against the remaining parameter.”

“I could automate that for you.”

“That would be useful.”

Over the next few months, I made the program produce massive tables of outputs that Alf wanted. Then I realised that these were hard to read so I spent some time working out how to format the output to be first readable, and later pretty. Finally I put the pretty output in big blue binders. I did nothing to improve or verify the code at the centre of the program, but the output looked like proper scientific results. Alf was delighted, so was Joe, and when we presented the work to the Royal Radar and Signals Establishment at Malvern, they were delighted too. “Just what we need”, said the senior officer. No-one seemed to notice that the figures suggested that the equipment was useless or that the figures were anyway entirely fictitious. I learned that the authority of a piece of work is massively enhanced by the way it is presented, in this case to the point where the content doesn’t matter. At all.

The train is pulling into Paddington. I search Wikipedia for the system that we were designing. Wikipedia says that the project was not successful.