Chapter 9

Next morning, I was at our venue bright and early. So were Tim and Maggie and – loudly bemoaning his missed breakfast – one of Maggie's innumerable brothers, Sean, all of them as bemused at the early hour as the hotel staff, themselves clearly unused to conference delegates turning up at 7am. In any case – maybe because they weren't actually fully awake – they all followed my instructions without a question: Maggie, employing some side cutters, Tim, despatched back to the office to put a soldering iron to good use and Sean and myself getting down to cack-handedly arranging a variety of display boards and the like.

It's amazing quite how much damage you can do in a short time if you're focused.

A couple of hours later, anyway, Maggie and I were beginning the meeting and greeting process as the first of our various guests. Or delegates, I suppose. Tim had dropped off the necessaries – and a couple of new creations – and then departed again to pursue his nefarious purposes. Sean, we'd sent round the corner to a cafe that did a better – in the sense of bigger, greasier – breakfast than he would ever have prepared himself.

The first session, as is the way of these things, was, frankly, boring. Various people – including me – gave updates on our current 'state of play' positions, all of us, more or less deliberately, drawing out parallels and synchronicities.

When we broke for coffee, I got the complaints. OK, only from three or four people, but they were pretty upset. Seemed our improvised intranet wouldn't give them access to the web and they'd failed to find a wi-fi node ... and couldn't get a data-capable phone signal.

Which was not as much of a surprise as it might have been, I felt, but for appearances sake the hotel factotum was summoned. The conversation – held in a quiet corner of the lobby, with just Sean (who's not small) and myself in earshot – went something like this.

"Your wi-fi's not working."

"I'm sorry, it was checked yesterday evening but you were here very early and you did also specify that you didn't require such a facility, so..."

"We don't. Also, we'll pay for the damage that my colleagues inadvertently did to your antennae and cables and things. Better yet, I'll get them to repair it all ... just as soon as we've finished."

I can't say that the man looked too pleased about this – I got the feeling that wi-fi was something of a black art, as far as he was concerned – but we had paid premium prices for his rather tatty room and lukewarm coffee, so there wasn't anything much he could do about it.

And Sean loomed very effectively, I thought...

So, FaceBook and Twitter accounts remained un-updated, and doubtless hugely urgent e-mails were at risk of going unread for actual hours. People could, of course, use their phones – albeit in a limited fashion – but aside from maybe taking photographs of the presentations, they couldn't do too much harm with them. Certainly, no-one could get hold of any of the raw engineering data we'd be sharing – or the financial projections Steve and I had mapped out in advance – and, possibly, share it with ... anyone else. Anyone not invited to the meeting, in other words. And they wouldn't be able to do so until we'd reached whatever decisions we came up with at the end of the day.

To which end, while Sean and I had been being relatively unpleasant to an innocent hotel person, Tim and Maggie – and a slightly confused looking Steve from FlexnBalls – were doing similar good things, kindly ensuring that some of our guests did not have to do so much as go the toilet – or out for a fag, whatever – unaccompanied.

In fact, Steve and I did most of the donkey work while we were in 'session', each covering the single exit when the other was speaking, that sort of thing. It helped that we already knew what we were each going to say, which saved us having to listen to 'our' bits, and that the vast majority of our audience had enough riding on the outcome of the event to be pretty much engrossed in proceedings. Those few who did feel the urgent need for a breath of fresh air – and there were more of them when Steve was speaking than when I had the mike, I was pleased to note – were relatively easily handled. I mean, we genuinely weren't all that well briefed on all the projects represented at the gathering and neither of us had much trouble in finding conversational topics with which to engage anyone who stepped outside for the briefest of moments. Of course, we'd have had a problem following all or our guests into the toilets, what with both of us being male and all that, but we did have Maggie to fall back on and, anyway, Tim's little burst of activity in the morning had made that particular bolt hole pretty useless, communications wise.

Lunch was more of a challenge, not least because the mediocre buffet supplied by the hotel – and the genuine need people had to peel off from the group and discuss events in some degree of confidence – led to a fair number of people deciding to find refreshment elsewhere. That we managed to extend our blackout to a number of local cafés and even to Regents Park itself relied on guile, bloody mindedness – each of us invited ourselves along with a departing individual or group without waiting for anything quite as quaint as an invitation – and, of course, the appropriate technology. Or, specifically, a number of crude but effective jammers, none of which had any great range but which did pretty comprehensively degrade wifi and mobile signals within their ambit. Not without a degree of collateral damage, of course – at least one local diner required an after the event apology for its sudden loss of web access – and not without, well, a degree of illegality. Quite a high degree, come to think of it.