My confidence had gone. Burning with embarrassment I turned to the others. 'Sorry everyone, I still don't know how long it will take to sort out the system. I'm not the superstitious type but - is it best to give up now before anything worse happens? I'll contact you about another demo when we've sorted ourselves out. Sorry again, I hope I've not wasted too much of your time.'
I returned to my desk physically shaking. My own terminal was unaffected by the failure in the training room, and from habit I logged on to look at my e-mail. Among a dozen routine messages was an urgent one from Peter asking me to produce a paper on the latest system enhancements for the afternoon session of the partners' quarterly meeting.
His secretary could not give me a reason for this sudden request. Peter himself could not be consulted as he was at the meeting, but she promised to tell him that I needed to talk to him about exactly what he wanted as soon as he came out.
As I put down my phone I noticed a message asking me to ring Tom immediately. I tried his home number and his mobile 'phone several times without success, and was annoyed that he had left an urgent message but was not waiting to take the call when I rang back.
Curious as to why the partners were to discuss the latest system enhancements that afternoon I began hunting through earlier papers and memos, looking for positive statements about the benefits, guessing at the sort of thing he might want. Three-quarters of an hour later he came hurtling towards me. 'You've made a start?'
'Yes.'
He looked quickly at what I had prepared. 'What I want to do is to argue for using what you've developed as a standard for accountancy systems nationally. There's no technical reason why other accountancy partnerships should not take on the developments is there?'
'No, but they may have other-'
'My idea is this. If we can convince the Institute of Accountants it should act as the national authority for setting standards for accountancy systems, better deals could be negotiated with suppliers, inter-working between companies would be easier, and the profession would be saved a lot of reinventing the wheel. In the long term we should have better systems at lower cost, the copyright on software owned by the Institute rather than individual suppliers. You see what I mean?'
His thinking had taken a giant leap from an upgrade to our internal system to the adoption of national systems and standards. 'Ideally yes, but would the Institute be willing to involve itself? They've always kept aloof from information technology. All their Systems Subcommittee does is to produce a newsletter about things that have already been implemented, they don't take a lead in anything. Competition among accountancy software suppliers is tough. Trying to take over control and get them to co-operate and let the Institute hold copyrights...'