I don't have a clue what's going on

"You're not like most IT people I know." When my friend Kellie said this she'd only just met me and I didn't know whether it was meant as a compliment. To be on the safe side I took it as one and it turned out I was right. Her husband is also a non-conformist IT person; her perception apparently is slightly unkempt men in black t-shirts and jeans who rarely see sunlight and spend their non-working hours sitting at the home computer. Admittedly I do pass hours on Facebook and (occasionally) blogging but she was thinking more of online role-playing games, assembling machine code and hacking into the Russian nuclear arsenal.

Other people assume that because call myself a computer programmer I must be a techie. That's like mistaking a chauffeur for a mechanic. He doesn't need to know what's happening under the bonnet unless the car starts going wrong, or he finds the engine bay fascinating. I very definitely try to keep the bonnet shut.

Today I spent a bad deal more than three hours in a meeting about migrating application servers to a new dynamic services platform. (Your eyes are glazing over already. So were mine. But lunch was provided.) Around an hour in, discussion turned to TPMC benchmarks and performance slices, at which point one of my colleagues intervened. "I can see a problem here," he said. Me too: I didn't understand the subject at all. It turned out he did and had a valid concern, while I was just thinking about the Engie Benjy theme tune. "There's a problem here without a doubt/Let's look around and check it out." As you can tell, an hour of techie talk and my brain turns to mush.

If anyone can explain why there are five different versions of Windows 2003 Server, when logically one ought to be enough, or knows what a hypervisor is, please let me know. As to what will be "stored on VMFS SAN volume by VMware ESX server", your guess is as good as mine. The list of acronyms went on and on: RACI, iSCSI, DMZ, SATA. I'm sure someone out there understands all this stuff, but I wouldn't want to spend more than a few minutes alone with that person.

I don't build home networks or disassemble disk drives for fun. Nor have I memorised every IP address in the western world or read Computing Weekly. I just try to make things work a bit better for people in my office. So next time you have a problem with your PC/printer/MSWord/Excel/Outlook/modem/ISP/dongle/iPhone, improve your chances of getting a correct answer: walk straight past me and ask the nearest eight-year-old.

Let the train cause the strain - and the doctor not cure it

My train home was 30 seconds early one day this week. Just thought I’d mention it. You have to be careful with punctuality-related vocabulary. “On time” doesn’t in fact mean “as per the time shown on the timetable”, it refers to any time within 10 minutes of that shown. Obvious really. The railways don’t make much sense at all, frankly. The trains are owned by venture capitalists and run by a hotch-potch of franchisees on track that’s maintained (or not) by a variety of private companies contracted to a publicly-owned replacement for a previous privatised government department – and all overseen by a toothless watchdog.

I’m not old enough to remember the heady days of BR properly: days out to London on the train in the 80s were impossibly exciting but I suspect that was due to the adventure rather than the quality of the rolling stock, some of which was orange. In the post-privatisation era Connex, who previously operated water pipes in France, proved inept and lost their franchise. I can’t even remember the name of the next company to take over Kent’s trains but they were almost as bad for quite a while. Then, just as they started to improve the service to Third World standards, they were booted out and SouthEastern Trains took over. With their shiny new rolling stock they’ve made inroads but still punctuality is a sticking point. And although they hide behind (or under) leaves on the line and the inadequacies of Network Rail, it seems to me the real problem is targets.

The government, or one of its quangoes, supplied the rail companies with detailed information about the arrival times of their services, told them they had to match the timetables, and allowed them to modify the timetables. You didn’t have to be a prophet to predict what would happen next. My regular trains to and from work used to be scheduled to arrive at 8.31 and 18.20 respectively, and were late (in the normal sense of the word) more often than not. Now four minutes has been added to each timetable and curiously enough, punctuality has improved. This is aided by the 10-minute leeway which allows the rail companies to boast 90+% of trains are “on time” and the government to bask in reflected glory. In the real world, our journeys are still as long as before. Sometimes longer: at the fringes of peak time and in the evenings, trains are frequently held at stations because they’ve arrived early but can’t leave until the new timetable allows. I’ve heard it said that fast trains from Margate to London take longer now than in 1947, where locomotives ran on smelly Welsh coal and the carriages were made from old packing cases. So much for progress. Give me a train that’s fast rather than punctual, please, if you can. But it won’t happen because the current situation is too cosy: shareholders get a dividend; the inherent deficiencies of the whole set-up are hidden; and fewer poor-performance fines have to be paid from taxpayer subsidies.

It’s not only rail passengers that suffer from crazy targets. Our doctor must see within 48 hours every patient who makes an appointment – it’s in his patient charter, or something. What it means in reality is that the receptionist takes bookings only 48 hours ahead and once the list is full, you have to ring back the following day. Genius or madness? The only beneficiaries are the consultants paid to find loopholes in these nanny-state regulations.

If I could draw up targets like this, I would oblige myself to attend work only once a week. Then I could turn up a whole twice and declare it a minor triumph which qualified me for a bonus.

Seeing as I can’t set my own performance targets, I will direct towards those in government who think these things are a great idea, an ancient Arab insult: May the leaves of a thousand trees delay your journey home. I fear it may fall on deaf ears as they sit in their limos.