Rupert Goodwins' Diary
The fuzzy memories of last night -- stuffed chillis in a Mexican restaurant are probably not best washed down with Isle of Jura malt in Sandy Bell's, if you want a quiet and restful sleep -- gradually fade over breakfast. There then follow some one-on-ones, including an hour nattering with the aforemenched Keith Turnbull. As usual, things take a little while to warm up. I'm not the most natural of interviewers, and find the artificiality of the situation and the adversarial aspects unnatural and unnerving. But once contact has been made, which in my case is usually easiest with engineering types, we're off. We banter away about quality of service, heterogeneous devices -- Citrix is keen to encourage lots of different ways to do things, he says - and the acquisition of the GotoMyPC mob.
Then it's time to repeat the exercise with the European MD, which is less successful. He's up on the marketing stuff, and I run out of ways to synthesise interest in the matter. The one time I think I've got something interesting, I'm wrong: he too is talking about GotoMyPC and suddenly mentions a new product, GotoMarket. My ears prick up. But no, it's just that catchphrase 'go to market' meaning 'launch something'. (Incidentally, the accursed Accenture win this week's Boloxpeak Prize for "reduced cost of expedition" meaning "cheaper to do".)
The rest of the day is unremarkable, excepting only that I try to use a T-Mobile hot spot. Fantastically expensive at £5 an hour, I can instead opt for a special, T-Mobile telephone subscriber option where as a sign for how much they value my custom I can buy access and charge it to my mobile phone bill for a mere £6 an hour. After much struggling -- the signal varies between full-on and full-off -- I manage to sign up and enjoy moments of access before a hail of dropped connections finally make me give up. I try and log out -- what little online help I can find seems to indicate that if I don't, I'll be charged for infinite amounts of time, but it's not clear -- but the Log-Out button merely returns a Javascript error. Later, I'm online for longer from somewhere else and try to find out anything that might tell me whether I was logged out, or would log me out properly, but there's nothing online and no phone support. Completely unacceptable, and the experience leaves me determined never to use the darned service again. I may not bother keeping my T-Mobile phone subscription for much longer either.