Chapter 63

Andrew spent the evening with his parents before he left for Milton Keynes. He spoke to Leslie when he returned from the Food Bank and gave her the latest scoop on Katie and Tanvi. She just laughed.

“You know you are going to bang them both, don’t you? Probably at the same time.”

“Hey, that’s not fair. How am I going to sleep on the train with that image in my head?”

Andrew also told her about the following Saturday and she said she would collect him. He rang off and called Nikki. She said sure to his coming through but they would talk and confirm when so that it worked with Fran’s shifts. Then it was a late night trip down to Waverly. Andrew showered before he left so that he should survive through until the Monday night.

At 7.50 the next morning he was standing at Milton Keynes Central station looking for a cab. Then he spotted a city bus with the Open University campus as its destination. Finally at 8.35 he was at the sign in desk at the Computer Science department.

“Andrew McLeod.”

He gave them his Open University ID number.

“Good morning Andrew. Professor Young told us we would be surprised by one or two candidates. I am the department administrator, Mary Young. Frank is my husband.”

Andrew reached out and shook her hand.

“Pleased to meet you. The details of the week are all a bit thin at the moment. Is there a timetable for the week, what we are doing, all that kind of thing?”

A folder of material was passed to him with a flourish and he was directed down the hall to a tutorial room. Andrew was the second person there. He hated situations like this. Should he sit next to the other person, away from him, near him? These kind of social situations still gave him trouble. Fuck it. He went and sat at the same table but not right next to him. Easy conversation with the guy but not on top of him. There followed an endless round of introductions as more people came in. There were four tables with space for six at each. At 9.00 there were 20 of them when Frank Young came in and the week commenced.

Three quarters of the week was a detailed review of their submissions, asking why they did it one way rather than another. As Andrew had suspected it was mainly used to check for academic fraud, for him there were no issues. The rest of the time it was one on one discussions with the lecturers. He stayed calm as the first 10 minutes of every session was commenting how young he was. Once they had gone through that obligatory ritual then the rest of the sessions were helpful. He talked about the FORTRAN exercises he was working on and got some very useful hints and tips.

Friday was set aside for a session between the whole faculty and each person. Mary had checked everyone’s travel arrangements and Andrew told her he was on the 11.45 sleeper to Edinburgh from King’s Cross and could leave Milton Keynes as late as 9.00. He was therefore assigned the last slot of the week. The rest of the day was spent in the computer lab working on his coursework. Several others were there but during the day they whittled away.

Socially the week had been fine. There were three guys who were all bent out of shape about his age. Lots of ‘get him a glass of milk while the men have beer’ type stuff. They were harmless and if they had given it a break after the first day it would have been fine. A whole week of it was grating not just for him. The rest were a typical cross section of British life. Two Boyo’s, one other Scot and 16 English. Seven from London, the rest scattered around. Only one woman, the middle-aged mother of two boys. Andrew thought she might be there for a break from them, she looked tired and harried. There were a lot of civil servants, at least six, maybe more. He chatted away to people over dinner, answering the common question of why the hell was he on a university course at 15. Once they realised that there were no micro courses yet at the school level and that he had gamed the system as there were no pre-requisites that they could ask for, there was a degree of grudging respect. Andrew said he was taking it slowly on the courses and just doing work as school allowed. One of the guys rather called him on his bullshit on that one.

“Taking it slowly. You are a third of the way through a computer science degree and you are still only 15. I would hate to see you if you decided to go fast.”

Andrew blushed because he was absolutely right. Other than that it was a good time. He did not do as much studying as he anticipated. There was a lounge adjacent to the bar and Andrew would sit with five or six of his classmates most nights and carry on chatting. A lot of it was very technical computer chat, nerd paradise in other words, but there was a good range of topics covered. The guys would go and grab a beer from the bar and bring it through if they wanted one. The one woman, Carol was her name, was fascinated by the fact his parents had let him come here on his own. Her oldest was about to turn 14 and she did not see him there in two years.

“Mum and Dad have been amazing. Best parents at the school for trust in their kid. I am pretty driven, well you have to be to be doing what I am, so they let me be. I am home by 11.00 most nights. My sister is a high maintenance drama queen, I think they are just glad they don’t have two. How is your husband coping with the boys on his own?”

“I shudder to think. As long as they are all in one piece and the house hasn’t burnt down it will be fine.”

Nearly everyone was married and a lot of the older guys had kids his age or even older. There was a lot of head shaking and mumbled comments of ‘I could never imagine x here’. It was to be expected. On the Thursday night they were sitting and chatting and the conversation came round to selling software. Had anyone coded anything that had been good enough to sell? This was starting to get into trickier territory. Time to gloss over this aspect of his career he figured.

“Andrew, what about you?”

Rather than answer the question as it was asked instead he told the tale of sorting out the lawyer’s office. Played up the senior partner’s son and how they were friends angle.

“It was straightforward. Patience and follow the instructions. It is scary how few people do that last one.”

There was vigorous nodding at this and the conversation moved away to the stupidest thing that anyone had seen. Andrew didn’t know if he would see any of them again but they did a bit of the phone number exchange at the end of the night. Why anyone wanted his phone number he wasn’t sure.

So Friday afternoon saw him as the last student in the computing centre. It was already 6.00 as the process was running late. Finally it was Andrew’s turn in the Star Chamber.

“Thank you for waiting all day. Mary tells me you are on the sleeper north so you were happy to take the last slot. Thank you for that. We have been impressed with your progress Andrew. A blip in the graphics module but everything else an A or strong B. You started off gangbusters but your pace has slowed recently. Are you struggling with the material?”

“No sir. I am tutoring a young woman in school at Maths and this has ended up taking more time than I originally thought. To complete the modules you have to put the time in. I should start to get more time back from May onwards. I doubt I will ever match the first course pace but I am still optimistic that I can get the degree the same summer as I complete school.”

“Are you doing anything with the information and techniques you are learning, beyond the assigned classwork.”

“Yes sir. I have a friend who I code with every weekend. We use the techniques we learn. Once I have finished a module I give him the material and he goes through a lot of it. He doesn’t do every exercise but he does most of them. He is much better at coding graphics than I am, for example. More elegant and three quarters of the lines of code, he just gets it. Most of the rest we are about the same. We have written quite a few programs and pieces of software and have managed to sell some of it.”

This caused quite the stir.

“You have sold software to businesses?”

Professor Young was clearly interested.

“Yes sir.”

“Come on Andrew, out with it. What?”

“Julian and I go for things that make people’s lives easier or allow an organisation to have more control. We sell it cheaply as we would rather have lots of small sales than one large one. I developed some VisiCalc templates nearly two years ago. Nothing fancy but way too many businesses had bought into the business magazine hype and spent serious money on computers and VisiCalc. We would sell them templates and show the staff how to use them. The staff would be writing something better within a year but this boosted productivity immediately and justified the purchase of all the hardware. The other one we made was based around control and utilising the new modems coming out. We made a program that recorded sales and then passed that information to the head office via modem. Started at bookies, went to other chains, and finished up at petrol stations. Again, these will all be thrown out in a year but we gave an immediate boost. Quick and nimble. A cheap add on that increases the productivity of the underlying businesses. Or allows control by head office. The petrol companies are using it as a way to confirm stock levels at the stations so they don’t run out.”

Everyone was silent. Frank Young looked like he had won the Pools.

“That is a great story. And you were able to do this through the material taught on this course?”

Andrew nodded.

“Andrew, if you will allow us, you will be the main part of our marketing material for the course next year. That is exactly the kind of inspirational story that will impress potential students. It is also the kind of entrepreneurship that our new political masters will find impressive as well.”

“Sure sir. Send what you want to say about me and what I have done up to the house. Remember I am still a minor and Mum or Dad will need to sign off on it.”

There were handshakes all round and then the Professor led him through to the department office. He was going to give Andrew a lift to the station so Andrew grabbed his bag and waited while Mary put on her coat and then the three of them walked out to his car. Professor Young thanked Andrew for sharing the story and dropped him off at the station 10 minutes later. All in all it had been a good week. The journey home was long and he had to hang around Kings Cross for more than an hour but he was back in Edinburgh by 7.00 the following morning. As Andrew walked up to Princes Street to get the bus home he smiled as he thought about the software that he had not mentioned. In three hours they were going to share with Leslie the finished product. The question was, would anyone buy it?

Leslie was pleased with what they had created but also feeling stymied. She had been reaching out to CSG but the approaches were going nowhere. That was always their challenge and worry; they sat in Julian’s dining room thinking about it.

“You are sure that we don’t want to reach out to ComputerCom?”

“They have moved on from us. I am not sure I could talk to Kyle right now, hell he may have gone back to Canada for all I know. There is a lot of competition in the market and he sees us as small potatoes. Which is true but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a good product.”

“Can we go to the buyers directly? We were able to speak to the William Hill guy when we were pitching the original software?”

And so it went on. As the day wore on it again became clear how lucky they had been to hook up with ComputerCom in the first place. Now they were facing the reality that faced all small start-up businesses. How to break through, break into a market.

“Who do we want to try and sell this to? Big companies. Companies with lots of scattered operations. Governments.”

They were going round in circles and it ended up going nowhere. Andrew and Julian would meet the following week and map out the next set of features and just keep coding away. The next three months were frustrating for them all as they continued to develop the software while getting nowhere in their attempts to sell it.

Andrew was going out with Tanvi that Saturday. He had done some thinking while at Milton Keynes and decided to go with it. Not that he needed much pushing in accepting that outcome. Deep down Andrew worried that this was going to end very badly. In the meantime, he got to go out with two slender, petite girls one of whom was pretty and the other of whom was stunning.

“Have you ever been approached to do any modelling?”

He asked Tanvi this as they sat in the usual Italian restaurant.

“Don’t be silly Andrew. Why do you think I could be a model?”

“You are slender and beautiful. You have a very exotic look. I am always amazed that you like hanging out with someone like me?”

“I don’t really think about stuff like that Andrew. I am more conscious of my looks for how they make me stand out and I worry about abuse rather than wandering around making sure everyone knows how beautiful I am.”

“That might be the saddest thing I ever heard. One Saturday if you will let me I would like to take some photographs of you. I think that you look wonderful and then I will have some photos where I can show that I knew you before you were famous.”

They laughed at that.

“Why are you oblivious to my background Andrew? I notice that you don’t even call me Indian anymore. That was an eye opener for me. I had railed against being called Indian all my life but when someone actually did that I felt like part of me was not being acknowledged. How contrary is that? I love that you call me Scottish yet there is no hiding my Indian heritage. You just seem to ignore it. Why?”

“No idea. You are the first person of Indian parents that I ever talked to. It never occurred to me to treat you as anything other than a pretty girl on the hockey team. Is that due to lessons I learned from my parents? I have no recollection of discussion about people from other ethnic backgrounds. My parent’s families are solidly working class and Scottish going back generations. My grandfathers were a butler and a bus driver. Yet I am friends at school with people whose parents are doctors and lawyers. When Moira did well at her tests in Maths at Christmas I had to go and meet her dad. He is a Court of Session judge, and a senior one at that. I am sitting in the North British having tea with Lord Barnes yet two generations ago my grandfather might have brought the tea. Times change.”

He stopped and thought for a bit.

“The other thing that changed everything is the cancer. I was in two hospitals for treatment. I ended up at the Infirmary for my chemo which finally got my cancer into remission but I started my treatment, surgery and radiation, at the Sick Kids. I was a patient for several extended periods. It was there that I knew that what I was going through was serious. I saw children fade away and the bed be empty two days later.”

Tanvi looked enthralled and horrified at the same time.

“I spent a lot of time thinking and worrying about death. It is inevitable. There was no rhyme nor reason to the deaths. Some children got better, myself included. Others died. It made me realise what is important. That is why I have big issues with parents and authority figures I think. They are focusing on things that are not important. It is why I study every lunchtime and don’t care what people think of me. What is important is that I want to make a difference in the world. I am going to make a difference in the world. I am impatient when people get bogged down in stupidities. The way teachers treat us is pathetic. I am not close to any of my teachers, except maybe Mrs. Graves. I know that they all have control issues, a ‘do what I say’ mentality. Kearns was good to me when I first went back and I think he enjoyed the morning swims as much as I did. Lyle screwed that up. I thought Hendricks was cool but she was all pissy with me on the last day. The teacher I like best is Mrs. Graves. She is really nice and tolerates the endless stream of women who come to bother me in the library.”