act 6 scene 1

colourful india - orange turbans, blue skys, green and yellow taxies, purple saris and red tape…

one of the main reasons i’m in india is to receive a shipment of computers from the uk so that i can commission them before i leave.  they flew out on sunday night to join me, in theory, on tuesday night.  it’s now thursday night and we won’t see them until at least tomorrow.

on the way into the country customs issue each shipment with a unique number.  in fact it is a dusty computer that carries out this task - a task that it has happily carried out for many years.  when this system was written, by the india government’s internal it team they decided that this unique number would be six digits long, in the form of 100325 for example.  sometime early this week, before our shipment arrived, the dusty computer spluttered out the rather magical number 9,99,999.  shortly afterwards, following a few more coughs the computer gave up squeezing 10,00,000 into six digits and bluntly refused to allocate a number for my computers.  think of it like a year 2000 problem.

i’ve told this to two groups of people - those in i.t. and those who are not.  the former group know the punchline before i tell it, and the latter usually don’t…

anyway - they administered some cough syrup and it’s all better now, except that the computers brief period with the nurses has caused it to forget the exact location of my 600kg crate of computers in a vast warehouse.  so here we are on thursday night with very little we can do except cheer on the people who are gently tugging, pulling, moving and cutting at the red tape surrounding indian customs.

maybe tomorrow…