A trip to Shanghai with Andy

I am not sure if you know Andy, who is the director of IT at Baumhaus. The reason that I suspect that you don't know him, is because he is a bit like the Hooded Claw; elusive, mysterious and a tad shady. Like a lone warrior he guards the Baumhaus infrastructure from afar (well Sydney, Australia to be precise). Whilst England sleeps, he connects to the Baumhaus servers and does VPNs, remote desktops and complex diagnostics. Then once he has finished his tests, repairs, patches and upgrades, he sends me an email explain what he has done, which is only evidence that he ever existed before melting back into the darkness.

I then arrive at work, and delete the email without reading it because I can never understand what he is on about. The system works remarkably well.

Another reason that he is a mysterious is because he 'alledgedly' lives in Sydney, Australia. I can verify that his lives there to some extent, because I stayed at his house when I visited him and his wife, Annukka last year.

Pic. No. 1 Annukka Dickens (my lovely sister-in-law!). She is in charge of Environmental Policy for Hewlett Packard (entire Asia-Pacific region), so she spends most weekends saving whales, talking to trees and drinking carrot juice.

Anyway I digress. Back to Andy; whenever you speak to him, he is always somewhere completely different. Please could I present the point in case; I called Andy today to ask him a quick question about our Server configuration. I heard some 'funny' noises in the background so I asked;

"Where the bloody hell are you?"

"Shanghai," he replied as though he had nipped out to Waitrose. "What are you doing there?" I asked.

"Watching the F1" he grunted (his nickname is Victor Meldrew, but tell anyone that I told you).

"Oh ok." I replied. "By the way, people are starting to think that you don't exist, and I must admit, there is scant evidence to refute this. Would you mind wearing a Baumhaus t-shirt and go and take various pictures of yourself at random locations around Shanghai?"

"Yep no problems" he replied, "speak to you later".

The nice thing about IT people is that they are always so darn reliable. Sure enough, 10 hours later, my inbox pinged, and there sat an email from Andy. So let's embark upon a trip around Shanghai with Victor...........sorry, Andy...........

Pic. No. 1 Andy in front of a stick with a ball on it

Pic No. 2 Bloke asleep on a scooter

Pic. No. 3 The Bund (yep, I didn't know what it was either, but a quick internet search reveals: The Bund is one of the most famous tourist destinations in Shanghai. Building heights are restricted in this area).

Pic. No. 4 There is nothing like unnecessarily limiting your market


Pic. No. 5 Andy seemed to find this picture of 'comprehensive business services' extremely amusing. He's a bit weird.

I hope you enjoyed your brief sojourn to Asia. I shall of course be making Andy work a lot harder on providing lots of interesting things for you read about.

By the way, I hope you are enjoying your Bank Holiday weekend!