The organisers had made a terrible mistake in bringing together this bunch of rude, disobedient ego-maniacs. They had been locked up for a week at this luxury hotel to work collaboratively on developing innovative research proposals, but since their arrival all they had done was misbehave, and this was all at the tax payers’ expense.

The climax came when a short young man from IBM took to the stage. Admittedly his presentation was extremely cliched and dull – he worked his way through the history of computing with ancient lumps of hardware as props – but he didn’t deserve the booing, hissing and an eventual walk-out of almost everybody in the room. It was his comment that all university records could easily be accommodated on a single server that seemed to annoy the delegates the most. “Even the library catalogue?!”, “What about admissions?” shouted out members of this dubious audience.

I was one of the few who stayed to watch the rest of the dreary performance. I sat with my school friend CC who had been following me around all week like a faithful pet, and a sandy-haired man who had brought his young son to the event, even though it was against the rules and the poor lad was desperately homesick for his mother.