Shhh, what's that sound?

Listen carefully. There. Did you hear it? Get closer. Yes? That little high pitched squealing. It wasn't there before. Can you guess what it is? Well I'll tell you. It's the sound of every fucking atom in my oversized, bearded frame raising its tiny sub-microscopic voice to the heavens in euphoric cacophony. Mitochondrial DNA is currently cracking out the decks in preparation for an all night rave as chromosomes sway to rich, buzzing trance anthems, lit only by the flickering light of molecular glowsticks.

We have finally exchanged contracts on the house. This mundane-sounding event marks the end of a week that can only be described as a monument to epic clusterfuckery. In fact, it concludes the whole sorry event of house sales and purchases which began badly in March/April and then slid down a shit-stained slope like an obese child on a toboggan who, after the brief rush of adrenaline, realises they are sliding unstoppably towards a busy motorway. A motorway used exclusively by chunky-loving paedophiles.

We have had 30 sets of strangers through our doors and in a strange symmetry have been strangers in the same number of houses. We have experienced the full might of estate agent ineptitude. Just when we thought that their astronomical inability to market a house had hit a new low, they would dilligently pull out industrial shovels and dig like pirates near gold. In fact the only saddening part of exchanging contracts is that we will have to give these fuckwits money for their provided "service". I use the term so loosely that it's in danger of falling off and shattering on an incorrectly priced kitchen floor. I now wish that I had spent my time in IT more wisely and invented a way to digitally wipe my arse on electronic funds.

We've offered on and lost either 3 or 4 houses we liked as the September deadline loomed ever closer. After finally finding a house we liked and a buyer who could get over the fact that the garden wasn't big enough to reenact the Battle of the Somme, we managed to sidestep solicitors of considerable and well-publicised incompetence only to meet up with them again further down the chain, like an ex at a party who has spent the years getting fatter, uglier and more prone to involutary pant-spoiling. It was therefore only fitting that the story would conclude itself like a James Herbert novel, twisting and turning as you flick pages with an ever-increasing feeling that the hero is going to die and that the murderous beast will do much the same thing again in a month's time, in an entirely different book about entirely different people. In the past two weeks, completion dates have come and gone, stretching beyond the start of my course (and thus dooming me to 12 more months of XML-inspired labour-camp joy) only to be snapped back with a sharp tug on the leash, spewing rabid foam through 3-bedroomed teeth. Ex-wives have appeared as if from nowhere threatening to withold required funds unless the universe cowtowed to her new untested physical laws. New universes have had to be created and positioned to hit the completion date.

But with one phone call, we are there. Our Bristol-based solicitors (Burrough's Day if you haven't been paying attention and are still wanting to move) have been exceptional. Our removal firm have been thoroughly understanding of the process. Our sellers' estate agents (Stratton Creber) have been awesome. Our buyers and sellers have been superbly reasonable and I advise anyone moving house that direct contact with these parties will stop you wanting to smash kittens with hammers. My wife has been an absolute star, managing to stay positive through the whole saga whilst sat at home surrounded by boxes and Cillit Bang.

So, next wednesday we move and a new life of sea-related beard-stroking draws near. By a stroke of luck and deft toboggan manipulation the fat kid may well end up on a hard shoulder filled with lusty, oiled, chunky-loving Playboy bunnies. Playboy bunnies with pie.

Sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip

I am officially 2 feet of hair lighter today. Reaction has been mixed to say the least. So far my favourite comments are "well, it's not as awful as it could have been", "you look middle aged", "you look like someone's dad", "you look like Don Johnson" (from a bald man) and "you look much younger"(from my new best friend). So either I previously looked 50 and now look a youthful middle-age, or people have hugely different views of follicular age determination.

Actually, that's a lie. My favourite comment so far is "you've had your hair cut!". Which is odd, because I thought that I sat in a chair for an hour last night while toucans massaged my skull. £34 for a soothing treatment from exotic birds seemed like a bargain.

My official reason for having it done is that long hair is a fucking pain in the arse when diving. Getting a hood on takes longer, sorting it out afterwards requires power-brushing that would skin a rhino. But it's also nice to look at it as a break from the past. My flowing girly locks have been with me through school, university, reenactment and work. It has seen my clothes change from snow combats and ripped t-shirt to velvet shirts and new rocks, to a walking marks and spencers advert. It bore witness to the rise and collapse of the dot-com bubble and the stratification of the IT industry into really good ideas that cost an awful lot of money, and really bad ideas that seem to cost more. My hair had out-survived the Yangtze river dolphin. My wife, like a chinese hair-biologist will mourn; my mane wistfully remembered in slowly flicked pictures damp from salty tears. I hope that's where the similarity ends. My hair is in a bag in a drawer somewhere in the house. The removal men are going to be pretty pissed off it they have to transfer 200 kilos of soggy decaying freshwater mammal down to Plymouth.

I'm just glad that my initial fear of my hair being the source of my sarcasm have failed to materialize. With 14 days left in this industry followed by 3-7 years of being surrounded by 18 year olds giggling into their mobile phones whilst proclaiming "WHY MUST YOU JUDGE ME??!", I'm going to need all the vitriol I can muster.

Facebook Frolicks

Seems that importing this blog into facebook has several issues. It seems that the 250 word intro created on the import doesn't make it obvious it's only part of a post. Obviously using an ellipse would cause the universe to explode. So a click on "View original post" is required. The alternative is notes that are 1000+ word rants, and for that, I'm going to need much bigger post-its.

Honey, have you seen the cat?

Well, the house is now officially a maze of boxes. Horror room 1 (the garage) has been cleared and organised into boxes of "Things I never used" and "Things I use less than that". Spiders the size of minivans have been evicted from their makeshift caves, no doubt to prowl the streets looking for a new lair in which to trap hobbits. I've also found that golf club bags are a great storage device for swords. I must remember to separate the contents again before I step onto the course. Either that or create a new sport of BloodGolf. Holes in one would be infinitely more likely.

I also discovered the delights of freecycle. One ad for a sofa placed and within 72 hours a gollum-type creature with a dodgy heart was trying to load the suite onto a towtruck to deliver it to people he'd never met. Bless the internet. It somehow has the ability to turn the most mundane jobs into epic clusterfucks which characters who seem to be the bastard children of a drunken mistake between Alan Bennett and John Webster. Gollum was kind enough to leave his number in case we needed rescuing in his towtruck or something stored somewhere, or a removal van, or a guide to the treasures of Tenochtitlán, something, anything, just please call me again. You never know. Perhaps I may break down somewhere one night in a storm in the middle of nowhere, after a nuclear holocaust in which the only survivors are me and a broken man with a fetish for vehicles which move things. Maybe then, if I can find a phone amongst the radioactive debris and scare the rats away from it, I will give him a call and ask if I can utilise his expertise. Or I'll just drink the water and wait for sweet, merciful death.

Until such a time, I shall continue packing. Horror room 2 (the kitchen) still needs to be done and I've no doubt a fun filled afternoon of watching my life repeatedly flash before my eyes as I get stuff down from the loft awaits. A trip to the swedish kingdom of flatpack also looms on the horizon to plan and cost a kitchen amonst the Groblaks and the Fandiks. If I can time it with the holocaust, I might even be able to get a parking space.

Tonight, we dine in IKEA.

And so it begins...

What drives a 31 year old to leave a job in IT, sell his house and drag his unbelievably understanding wife 130 miles to start a new life in a new city as a penniless student?

Cod.

For 9 years I have existed in a world where despondency is not only rife, but accepted as part of the process. Projects are more likely to fail than they are to succeed. Deadlines and budgets go whistling by with little more than a raised eyebrow. Even when a project does complete within budget and on time and is delivered to a client like the rarest glittering diamond, one finds that the client would have been happier with a cubic zirconium from QVC which they will replace within 6 months.

IT is an industry where no-one speaks the same language. Clients and sales staff converse in pseudo-technobabble whose sole purpose is to cause the till to ring each time a buzzword is abused. Phrases such as “Enterprise Architecture” are worn like a fake Rolex watch – devoid of value but oooh, shiny and impressive to other fake watch owners.

Whatever dark agreement is birthed from this relationship is then passed down the chain, translated and mistranslated into ever more ambiguous terms until a stage is reached where all working on the project are on a journey to wildly different destinations. Fueled by quantum requirements which twist and writhe each time they are observed, and managed by people with little or no understanding of what they do, developers push onwards, churning out code to feed the Gantt-chart beast - unconcerned that their goal isn’t shared by anyone around them. When original costs and timelines are long forgotten, the end product is pushed out the door, a partially tested crippled abortion of a once golden dream. Concerned parties then collectively shrug their shoulders and enthusiastically agree that mistakes will be rectified and the dream restored in the next release. Unconcerned parties are just grateful that another 6 months has gone by in which they haven’t been made redundant and that each collapsing phase brings their mortgage down and their holiday closer.

Conservation efforts, particularly in marine conservation share much in common with the IT industry. The collapse of the cod stocks off the coast of Newfoundland in 1992 sent up a flare, illuminating what happens when ecosystem management gets it wrong. Like a failed software delivery, blame was quickly apportioned and policymakers all agreed that they would get it right in the next release. With cod stocks on the verge of collapse in the North Sea, tuna stocks crashing in the Mediterranean and under serious threat around the globe, cold-water corals disappearing faster than they are being discovered and only 10% of large pelagic fish stock remaining, it is abundantly clear that the next release is going to be a catastrophic failure.

Like software development, each layer of marine conservation policy making and implementation has their own goal and their own interpretation of the information. Governments are desperately trying to protect their local economic interests, conservationists are trying to ignore international boundaries and protect biodiversity. Local fishermen, like team leaders, would like to see the project succeed as their livelihoods depend on it. They feel like they have the ability to affect the outcome but are constantly frustrated by the management levels above them failing to nail down a common goal. Corporate fisheries are the contractors of the marine world. They are there for the money and once the source fails, they will move on and acquire that money somewhere else.

The difference between IT and marine conservation is what happens when it all goes wrong. In IT, companies absorb the cost of the failure and either move on or go under, scattering their components into other companies, relatively untouched and ready to make the same mistakes again. When marine conservation policy fails species start to disappear, never to return. Biodiversity is reduced and dependent species die. The public, with its insatiable need for fish, barely blinks at the disappearance of a species and simply pushes the requirement onto another species, further shortening its path to critical endangerment. As species vanish and the oceans empty, policy makers move at a languid pace, seemingly unaffected by the devastation that is occurring under their noses.

Well, shit needs to change. I can no longer sit by and watch an environment I love be destroyed by apathy and a failure to reach a common goal quickly. This is therefore the journey of a man who wishes to make a difference, to shake up the status quo and to die knowing that at least for part of my life my contribution to the world was to try and stop the wholesale destruction of the oceans. And if I have to give up £40k a year and a life of internet browsing to achieve it, then so be it.