A Tale of Two Ties

November 1986.

It's an age of an age ago, yet it sits clear in the memory.
At the time I had been working for the QPac group of companies, then the owner/developer of the most widely used payroll system in the Western world, and after many years there I headed up the Financial Software division, QFin. QFin held the agency to the leading Financial Software Package of it's day, and our customers were a who's who of South Africa. When we held our user conference, 85 of the top 100 companies on the JSE were represented by their Financial Managers, Directors and Management Accountants … there wasn't a sector of Business that we did not straddle. SAP and Oracle would come later, but that was later. And on the Payroll side we ran even deeper. The model of pay-for-usage with affordable implementations kept our eye firmly on the goal of customer service and the pot-of-gold was a flood of recurring income.
.c.
Another company in the IT Sector was rising. Data Trust was the pre-eminent Software consultancy, and in the months leading up to November the two companies were locked in merger negotiations: my boss Des Gers led the Q team and Piet den Boer the Data Trust team. With the final talks done, the due diligences completed, the 2 companies were merged into a single entity called QData, and the success story of the SA IT world was underway. In its heyday the Q group employed 4500 highly skilled IT staff and even today, after many changes and re-arranges, BCX continues the tradition. In 1995 it was the winner of the Top 100 award and remained in the top 3 until it merged with Persetel.
.c.
In the Boardroom chosen for the day, all the Q and DT directors were gathered. Piet and Des had brought us together to meet: the listing had been a success, and QData was stretching it's wings. It was a curiously muted occasion, and what with the predominantly Afrikaans speaking directors from Piet's side and the largely English speaking Q people, the difference in language and culture held us back a bit: but we shared a common culture with regards to our view of the customer and this would pull things through later.
Brief introductions, a handshake, followed by an exchange of ties. That's them up there in the photo, the original ties from the first joint operational meeting of the newly formed QData Group.
.c.
From the Q side, a QPac tie and aQFin tie.
From Data Trust, their signature Blue and Red ties.
.c.
We came away from the meeting believing that the future was bright, but Piet came away wanting a whole lot more. He wanted to own IT is South Africa, and he near as dammit did: driving us all forward and extending the company's reach. He did it all from a little notebook that he used to keep in his shirt pocket, along with his cigarette box. We used to joke that the perfect design, perfect system, perfect anything could be described sufficiently on the back of a cigarette box, because that was as much as Piet ever needed, and look where it took him! Not too many people called him out, and survived it. I know one such, we met up in Sanlam's offices towards the end of 2009.
René's Story
She tells this story of Piet's comeuppance. She was a Business Analyst back then, and had been given a Business Case to work with. "Who wrote this piece of crap?" she asked. Piet's head popped up from behind a cubicle. "I did" he said.
So René, as one of the few people who has crossed Piet and survived, will now get one of those original ties :-). I guess she deserves it.  Two of the original set of four, one from each side, is enough for me, after all.
_________________
QPac was founded in 1967 by Des Gers and Ron Warren
Data Trust was founded on April Fools day in 1981 by Leen van der Bijl,and Bushy Bester ~ Piet (as I recall) joined them in January the following year.
Together in 1986 they were to be the driving engine of the most successful IT company in South Africa’s history.

Lazy Autumn days in the Cape

I came down to the Cape last Friday, and spent the weekend looking after the kidz' dog and the farmhouse while they went hiking and climbing.

Down here in this rather less sunny part of Sunny South Africa, Autumn is everywhere, and the cold Atlantic sends us fog in the early morning and icy breezes during the day. They interrupt the warm sun with a tart reminder that Winter is on it's way. So unlike the balmy autumn days of the joburg highveld!

What's better on Sunday than time spent on the beach? Don't answer: this is not about you, its about me :) It's a short trip from the farm to Muizenburg and its beach, where the surfers were taking in a last chance to get on their boards. Here its a family thing, with parents surfing with their children, couples making out in the waves, and the odd serious surfer dude/dudette looking on it all in disdain.

There is a slightly run down Cafe - the Gaslight cafe - close to the beachfront. Not that it is unhygienic, just not modern and spiffy. But it makes a wonderful breakfast, and you can have breakfast at any time of the day and night. If you are prepared to tolerate the bare walls and the broken view of the sea (through the car park!) then you are rewarded by a fine breakfast at a reasonable price and a view of the passing parade through the floor to ceiling windows.

So that was me on Sunday:

A long lazy stroll along the beachfront, following the railway line from Muizenburg to St James, wet feet as the returning tide caught up with me on the way back to the Gaslight cafe's simple and satisfying breakfast. Sometimes Sundays can be nearly perfect, can't they?

A River of Tears

We stood at the graveside
Her mother wept.
Her father looked dazed: the comfortless can not comfort.
She was 3 years old, dressed in her favorite frock, a bright pink bow in her hair, her arms crossed to hold her cherished Garfield; the coffin so very, very small.

And still her mother weeps.
For some mothers its like this: you have one shot at motherhood, and one only.
Its 25 years on and she goes to the cemetery and places the flowers every Saturday morning. Love is an obsession: its loss assuaged by a lifetime of tears.

As for us, on that bright Summer's day in the heat of the Highveldt, we, the voyeurs of pain, we went home, and put up gates, and fences, covers and nets, and watched our children: it had only taken 2 minutes: a steady count to 120, to learn that swimming pools are no place to be complacent.

Stirrings of manhood

I grew up in the Free State, in dusty little towns under high blue skies rising above the long flatlands of mielie fields. That would be corn, if you're an American or Canadian.

A common sight in those days were the black labourers digging trenches and ditches along the roads connecting the towns and along the pavements of villages.
It takes strength to swing a pick. It's backbreaking work, raising it high in the air, pausing, and in bringing down the strength into the hard earth. A motion forwards: the land gives way and crumbles, and the pickax soon rises again for the next blow.
You would see a line of these men, stripped to the waist, sweat runneling down their backs and across their chests. Often these would be prisoners serving time for a trivial offense: sometimes they were employed by the municipality to do the backbreaking work.

To truly do the job properly requires timing. Each man lifts high his pickax in the air, they pause as one, swing down, break and lift.

At the head of the line one man holds the time. He calls out in Zulu, or Sotho, or one of the myriad other tongues: in a singsong voice as one the pickax gang returns the chant. Every breath a pause, every pause connected to the pickax, the deep voices calling to the power, and then down! The earth shudders, breaks, crumbles.

Here were the first stirrings of my manhood. I sensed my power to come, I knew one day my muscles too would fill out, ripple, I too would gather my strength. I understood I was a man in waiting. The irony of the small white boy sensing his own strength and manhood in the song sung by the black labourers, the song of the pickax: this I would only realise many many years later.

The song of the pickax is celebrated by Gerard Sekoto, on a painting on canvas that he did many years ago. I came across it in a book in a shop in Rosebank, Johannesburg this evening. It stirred my memory and sent me back to a time when Labour was honourable, even though it was disrespected.

Solitude

Solitude is my one true childhood friend: he sat with me in new places, walked with me on strange roads, & slept with me in strange bedrooms.

This is not solitude born of loneliness.

This is the quiet space where reflection comes easy.

I met him in childhood, lying solitary on my back looking up at the clouds, in silent imaginings.

He stayed with me for a long time, as the family moved from town to town, in year and out.

He went his own way when I went to university, and later, after I married and had children I thought he had left me forever.

But now he has returned, and we renew an old and valued friendship.

I have the time for him again, and he for me.

Lazy Sunday Afternoons in the Shadow of Table Mountain

It was one of those Lazy Sunday afternoons.
Put the feet up and slope off in the house?
Hang out on the settee with the remote?
Nah.
Not on a beautiful early summers day like today,
with hardly a tourist in sight,
and Cape Town tanning herself under a warm Summers sun ...
and the table cloth spreading out over the Table top.

Chilled white wine, warm espresso coffee, carrot cake and a long Summer's day.
Eat your hearts out :)

oh my aching head when did the sun come up?

saturday? sunday? monday? going to bed or going to work?

oh my aching head ...