Mrs Fatterbottom's Burden

By Erik Ga Bean

When he asked her to keep house, she didn't realise that he meant forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erik Ga Bean
• Release date: Dec 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310583216

Erik Ga Bean

Science fiction fan, astronomy enthusiast and IT professional Erik Ga Bean lives in the English county of Hertfordshire with his wife Helen and his growing collection of carnivorous plants. As well as being an author, he is a keen narrowboater and a leading light in the Stevenage Plus social group.

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Mrs Fatterbottom's Burden

By Erik Ga Bean

Published by Erik Ga Bean at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Erik Ga Bean

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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To my wonderful wife Helen.

Chapter 1

Adam worked in a wonderful Welwyn Garden City office, in the English county of Hertfordshire. Whilst it was intended to be a software house, it felt more like a crèche for highly intelligent twenty and thirty-something mostly men. At the peak there were about ninety employees but more typically there was a core of about fifty.

The culture at the software house was so inclusive that if anyone had to be away from the office for a day, for any reason, they would be wondering what they were missing. In some part it was possible to keep up with events by following Timmy's blog but this was no real substitute for being there.

Timmy had originally been Adam's apprentice and had gone on to become his assistant. Their roles were fairly technical. When asked about their jobs they described them as similar to when old fashioned dairymaids used to pat butter into shape. In their case they used computers to pat data into shape.

Along with salesman Max, the three of them would form teams for most of the office competitions. Amongst so many other things, they produced the largest office windowsill tomato and only came second in the ivy growing race because of some inconvenient guttering on the outside of the building.

Much larger groups would come together when more help was needed with larger personal projects. The entire development team devoted a day and a half to the assembly of the overcomplicated wedding favours, when Adam's wedding to his university sweetheart Jane had to be brought forward. Whether or not the reception venue management had been planning to burn the hall down for the insurance before the original date, the weather had been much better on the new date. Being a weekday, many fewer of the guest list had been able to attend. This had significantly reduced the cost of the whole event.

Max had wandered amongst the guests at the wedding reception in his magician's costume. He helped to distract from the painfully long time that the photographer whisked the happy couple away for a slow and inconveniently located photo shoot. His interest in magic had grown from his quickly mastering the smoke and mirrors techniques necessary for presenting an unfinished piece of software as a complete one, which had been fully working on many customer sites for several months.

Friend as he was, Max put all the money which he produced from behind the guests' ears behind the bar. This really gave the party a swing which may have contributed to things getting so out of hand. It may have been that the original rumour had been wrong and the fire had always been planned for the new wedding date. In any case nobody was hurt, the day was memorable, the redevelopment of the site brought some much needed housing to the village and Jane took comfort that nobody else would ever be having a wedding in her venue.

Redundancies followed after the arrival of a new investor in the software house who contracted out the development work overseas. The software produced was so poor that the entire development team was required to satisfactorily test the new versions before they could be released. Costs rocketed as a consequence. The company soon went under and everyone lost their jobs.

After a couple of years spent making false starts in the employment market, Adam got a job at a local independent bookmaker. They were having difficulty competing with the larger chains. It was decided that the firm needed to remove some of the uncertainty from gambling. Unable to afford the large bribes required to fix matches, the company decided to take on a data specialist to predict sporting outcomes so accurately that astonishing odds could confidently be offered.

It was very clear to Adam both that his job was impossible and that all those involved with running the company believed employing him to be game changingly insightful. He decided to play along until the bubble burst. After eighteen months of sitting alone in a small office, which had once been a child's bedroom in the flat above the shop, Adam decided that he needed company. He managed to convince his bosses to take Timmy on as his assistant.

Whilst it was not a patch on the days at the software house, the two old friends enjoyed working together again. In two years they produced a beta version of the sports prediction software which simply looked at past results and allocated odds to future events accordingly. Whilst the same approach as bookmakers had been applying since the dawn of time, this impressed the bosses as a computer was doing it. The absence of the required accuracy was put down to it only being a beta release.

It was clear to both Adam and Timmy that the game would soon be up. They found that they were finding it increasingly difficult to keep up the pretence that there would one day be an unswervingly accurate Version 1.0. Even the entertainment that could be drawn from getting authorisation to order ever more unlikely components for the promised new machine began to wear thin.

The two men spent too large a proportion of their working days together reminiscing about the old days at the software house. One day Timmy suggested that they should look up Max. He had focussed his attentions on his magic after his software house redundancy. As part of this he had won a television talent show and briefly become very famous.

Once his eighteen months in the spotlight had run their course, he had retreated to a hermit's life in a remote hut. His home was