… is it’s not the same as effectiveness. A highly efficient way to travel from Britain to America is to sit in a coracle and, on average, face America when you are breathing in more and face Britain when you are breathing out more. Since you would be breathing in and out anyway, this has cost zero, and is therefore infinitely efficient despite only moving you perhaps an inch over the rest of your lifetime.

Our IT services at work are no longer looked after by three guys in York and we no longer have our own firewall and email server to have to look after. It’s much more efficient to move lots of services to Germany and have one guy here who is spending more of his time on ‘integration’ projects than he is on fixing our local issues.

The result? Here I am with a simple hour’s work to do before the end of the weekend, but every mouseclick is taking minutes because some server somewhere has some kind of problem, and we have to look at it through remote desktop, and guess what? There’s a problem with the server, but we don’t know what it is cos whatever it is has broken remote desktop too…