Washington Redface

Dave brings you the hot goss from Microsoft's partner summit. Also: data-entry Romeos, motivational masterminds, and menial robots

As one of Microsoft's top 50 resellers in the outer east London area (take that, Chingford Charlie's Network Solutions!), I was, of course, in attendance at the software titan's recent partner shindig in Washington DC.
Thankfully, for a tittle-tattle merchant such as I, amid all the on-message corporate back-scratching there were several pleasing outbreaks of foot-in-mouth disease. Not least the poor bigwig whose main-stage keynote speech featured repeated references to "Microsocks".
Then there was the Microsoft staffer who ran into an old reseller contact. The duo were ahead of me in the queue for the tea and coffee facilities, and after the usual ‘Hi-how-are-yas?', the Microsoftie ventured into the conversation proper with the following gambit.
"So, how's the wedding planning going...?"
"Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeah, about that...," came the reply. "The wedding's off."
If it ever gets back on, something tells me the vendor friend might not be on the invite list.

Spread the love
As a business manager of many years' experience, I'm a big fan of the spreadsheet. In fact, so handy have I frequently found them in my working life, that over time I've deployed them in numerous areas of my personal life.
I've got a spreadsheet to organise my monthly outgoings, to count my calorie intake - even one to manage the Orient awayday schedule. But even an Excelophile like me has never seen fit to keep track of my marital relations.
Which is more than can be said of the latest internet buffoon to achieve several seconds of notoriety, after he used a spreadsheet to record the excuses his better half trotted out for declining a bit of the other. The data reveals that the wannabe lothario suggested his partner join him in the boudoir 27 times in two months, with only three of the invitations being accepted.
Rather than discuss it with her as if she were a fellow human and his intellectual equal, the chap chose to email the spreadsheet to her, to illustrate the stagnation of the relationship. Now the document has been shared online, the frustrated fella has become the butt of the internet's collective joke. Well, they do say you can laugh a woman into bed...

Motivate to accumulate
I've never been a huge fan of motivational speakers. However, I understand from one of my vendor mates that his boss was put in the awkward position recently of having to cater for a particularly enthusiastic motivational speaker who insisted on rearranging the room to suit his presentational needs. Instead of a relaxed tables and chairs look, he wanted a more formal ‘horseshoe' shape.
"This room is quite large for the amount of people. Who decided it would look like this?" said the speaker.
"Er, I did," stammered the poor vendor boss. "I thought it'd be nice to have a relaxed feel where people can lean on tables and take notes."
Wrong, fella. Apparently the way to motivate staff is to sit them in a tight horseshoe shape, close together and with nothing to lean on, and stay that way for the next three hours. I wonder whether he accidentally hired an ‘interrogational speaker' by accident.

Robot chores
Regular reader(s) will be all too aware of how long I have waited for the imminent enslavement of humanity by shiny metal overlords.
Thankfully, that blessed day seemed to inch closer this week with news that G4S claims to have hired the first "autonomous robot... deployed in a working office environment, to do a real job". (Although if it were that autonomous, I dare say the bot might have thought its awesome combination of artificial intelligence and reinforced steel qualified it for a higher-powered position than office admin.)
The security services company claimed that while the robot - named Bob - "carries out his duties, he will also be gathering information about his surroundings and learning about how the environment changes over time". Somewhat eerily.
Bob, from the University of Birmingham, "will learn how to act intelligently and independently in real-world environments", claimed G4S.
Sounds impressive. Maybe these robots could eventually take charge of overseeing a major project. Like the Olympics, perhaps?