So, this week we do the two last - and smallest offices, Bristol and Cardiff. At once. I get roped in to create some batch files to copy the data (old letters) from one part of the network to another. I'm not really good with MS-DOS, so it takes me most of the morning, getting a text listing of directories then converting it into a series of move commands.

I do it. All looks OK. Come 1730 hours, I run the first one. Result - "File does not exist" a hundred times over. Disaster! What's happened? I find the directories are not where they were, but where they are meant to be - have I got the source and destination the wrong way round, or have the software development team moved them without telling the rest of us? Guess. . .

But it took an hour to sort all this out, with frantic directory searches and calls to mobile phones etc. . . and that was just Bristol! So, I check Cardiff too - and find that half the files are missing from the source, and there are a lot of files and half-empty directories appeared at the destination.

Further confusion! It turns out the developer sent to Wales for this had botched the move, tried to do a Copy, and then just given up, going to his hotel. I was there with the head of IT until 1930 writing another batch file to do a complete transfer. . .

Basically, programmers are the ruin of any IT Department. They usually act like they've crawled from under a rock, have no idea of business criticality, and yet believe the whole shebang revolves around them.