The decision to participate in Book Week was taken a full fortnight before the event, at a family meeting notable for its brevity and optimism. A character was chosen with the swiftness of people who do not yet understand what they have agreed to. Someone — I shall not say who, for they have suffered enough — suggested buying a costume online, ready-made, delivered to the door by Wednesday. This proposal was dismissed with the sort of contempt usually reserved for people who suggest taking a taxi up a mountain. We would make the costume. It would be better. It would have soul.
The fabric was purchased at Spotlight after two and a half hours of deliberation. I say two and a half because the shop was about to close.
What happened between the Spotlight expedition and the Sunday before the Monday, I cannot tell you. I assume planning was occurring. I assume designs were forming in someone's head, the way clouds form — invisibly, and with no fixed schedule. From the outside, nothing whatever appeared to be happening, and when I once enquired about progress I was informed that "it was all under control," which is a phrase I have since learned to fear more than any other in the English language.
On the Sunday, at mid-morning, the sewing machine was set up. This is a machine that spends eleven months of the year in a cupboard, sulking, and emerges only when the stakes are highest and the timeline shortest. Cutting commenced. Sewing commenced. Then everything stopped for a long period of thinking. Then a little more sewing. Then more thinking. The ratio of thinking to sewing was roughly that of a cricket match — long stretches of contemplation punctuated by brief flurries of activity that may or may not advance the score.
By half past seven that evening, the cloack remained unassembled. The crisis, as crises always do, had concentrated itself into one small and yet very visible component: the front closure. Ideas flew about the room. Fabric was draped this way, then that way, then a third way that was somehow worse than both. The teenager stood in the middle of it all like a maypole, being pinned and unpinned and turned about.
It was at this point that I removed myself from the process. I did this not from laziness, though I will admit laziness was present and willing, but as a considered act of matrimonial preservation. There are moments in family life when the most valuable contribution a person can make is their absence, and I have a talent for recognising them.
From the safety of the armchair, I observed the remaining team argue their way toward a solution. It was not a good solution. It was, by their own admission, the least crappy one, a phrase I intend to have engraved somewhere. It involved a fold, a pin, a hidden stitch, and a small act of faith, and it could be reassembled the following morning by exactly two people on Earth, both of whom would need to be present, calm, and speaking to each other.
The cloak was then laid flat on the floor, arranged just so, like a chalk outline at a crime scene — which, in a sense, it was. This was done "to ensure replicability." Nobody looked happy with the outcome. Nobody looked happy with each other. The teenager went to bed. The sewing machine smirked.
And here, of course, is where I recognised the whole affair for what it was: an IT project.
The scope was agreed early and with great confidence. The build-versus-buy decision went against the vendor solution on grounds of soul.
Requirements gathering took two and a half hours and was ultimately settled by running out of time.
The planning phase was invisible, unminuted, and declared "under control." All actual delivery was compressed into the final day, whereupon UX integration point — the front closure — consumed ninety per cent of the effort.
A stakeholder exited the project to protect the governance relationship.
The team shipped the least crappy solution.
The deployment procedure exists in the heads of exactly two people, is documented nowhere, and works only if nothing on the floor is moved before go-live.
And on Monday morning, as with every IT project I have ever known, it will be worn out the door, admired by everyone who wasn't there, and described by all involved — through gritted teeth — as a complete success.