Dialogue: Flattery will get you everywhere

By SANDY BURGHAM

My palm pilot crashed last week. The batteries fell out in the confusion of my handbag, along with the intangible information that runs my life - addresses, appointments, random lists of nonsense.

Oh, the trials and tribulations of an Auckland yuppie, you may think. But for those of us who lean heavily on various info-tech devices, life comes to a grinding halt when computers putter out.

I rang my competent and techno-literate PA immediately to share my pain, whining like a child that I couldn't possibly operate under these ridiculous conditions and might have to resort to pen and paper.

Bored already, she cut me off. "Did you load that software on to your new laptop? I'm assuming you've been hot-syncing, so just download the info," she shot back in techno-speak.

Oops. Whatever it was I was supposed to have done, I hadn't, serving to confirm her private view that techno-idiots like me shouldn't be allowed to operate at all in the big wide world.

When these IT machines, which are ironically supposed to be there for our convenience, fail inconveniently, it certainly highlights who calls the shots in contemporary business relationships.

It doesn't take much for those who use info technology - but don't understand it - to turn into helpless, hapless and hopeless dependents, indebted to those who fix IT things.

These boffins sit happily in the silent seat of power within organisations, a place previously occupied by the chairman's wife, the boss' secretary and the person with the keys to the booze cupboard.

A computer that works is now an executive's most fundamental need, and don't these smug IT folk know it.

IT people are now the key people one must keep on side as an insurance policy against inevitable problems which may hold up the quest to keep on top of things.

Julie bakes them cakes, I heard at a gathering recently, just so she retains her place at the top of the priority list. Remember when the Nimda virus was happening? That really paid off as she got seen to first.

The idea is that you need to earn a few Brownie points with these people to be redeemed later in a computer crisis.

Just talking to them is a good start, without making it too obvious that you are only using them for what they might be able to do for you one day.

Oh, how many out there are fair-weather friends to these poor IT sods who, had the digital revolution never happened, may have been invisible geeks found somewhere in the dark crevasses of the finance department, who management are always are at pains to make sure feel included.

I wonder whether they have noticed that even the most cantankerous and spiky senior-level types are almost unnaturally nice to them.

"Look, my view is that you need to be firm and direct with them," said one confident boss to a group the other day.

"Oh yeah, right," they all thought, "bet he just starts grovelling and begging for immediate attention like rest of us when computers go down."

I have noticed that one's demeanour changes around these IT types when they are restoring one's ability to log on in a digital world.

It is not uncommon to see people acting more hopeless and stupid than usual, as a way of accentuating their vulnerability in comparison to the revered greatness of the great IT-capable one.

We tolerate their quiet condescending tones because of our desperation to get up and running again.

A smart, fair-headed executive I know admits to playing the dumb blonde as a strategy of stroking the IT guy's ego to hurry him along.

IT people seem to speak a language we neither understand nor can be bothered picking up, apart from the odd word here and there, just as we would to order a coffee in a foreign land.

But we put ultimate trust in them to get our working lives back in order, which of course makes them the most wanted people, yet ultimately the most unaccountable, in any workplace.

If they make a mistake, who on Earth would know? They can blame everything on user error and no one would even challenge them.

Of course, as a big disclaimer I must now say that IT people are among the nicest people I have ever known. Have I offended computer boffins? Surely not.

In fact quite the reverse. There are not many people who secure friendships not on what they look like or how much money they have, but are simply loved for having the minds they have.

And there are not many people around who feel so desperately needed all the time. They really should be flattered.