The Meeting

The automated voice of the teleconference lady announces: "Now joining... Name not recorded".
The meeting has started late, and the latecomers are still arriving. This is mainly because everyone has so many meetings to attend, they're still trying to make it from the last late-running meeting to this one. The host starts a pre-amble.
"Okay everyone, first of all sorry we've started a bit late! Can I just - "
The automaton interrupts him: "Now joining... Name not recorded".
"...can I just check - "
"Now joining... Name not recorded".
"...who's on the call?"
There is silence.
"Do we have Jack?"

"Kathy?"

"What about Brad?"

While we wait, I look around the room and take in the cast of characters on our end of the phone.

First there's the Meeting Nomad who, although a project manager by job title, in reality drifts from meeting to meeting and sets up camp behind his laptop where he does other work, without listening to or participating in the meeting he is currently inhabiting. Consequently he learns nothing and adds no value to the proceedings.

Next is Loudmouth whose role is to assert his superiority in all situations, never allowing his complete lack of understanding to become an obstacle to this. He will have to be managed if there is to be a useful outcome, but sadly the ineffective host has none of the required skills to do this.

Next round the table, and sat next to me, is the Junior Developer who has the deepest understanding out of all of us of the issues about to be discussed, but whose lowly rank relative to Loudmouth will necessitate his silence.

To the other side of me are Network Guy 1 and Network Guy 2, invited because most of what we'll be discussing will involve computers, and computers connect to networks. They also will say nothing throughout.

Finally there is the aforementioned Inept Meeting Host who, having ascertained who is on the call, is now having problems with his laptop and is swearing under his breath as he tries to bring up the document we were going to discuss. This regular occurrence surprises only him.

That leaves me. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to attempt to come away with specific actions and decisions which will be of use to the Junior Developer who has 2 weeks to complete the work.

The Inept Meeting Host has now managed to bring up the document, but has failed to circulate it. He decides to email it round, but unfortunately his laptop claims never to have heard of our WiFi network. There ensues a lengthy period during which time Loudmouth and one of the Network Guys huddle round his laptop and join in with a Random American on the phone in offering suggestions.
(The Random American, incidentally, is only random because I have never heard of him, but from his authoritative tone I assume he is some kind of manager in the vast and bewildering hierarchy of managers there seems to be).
I lean across to the Meeting Nomad.
"Do you know if anyone from Test is coming?" I ask.
He looks up from his laptop and blinks as his eyes adjust to the real world. "Test?" he asks, as if he hasn't heard of this team before. I consider the possibility that perhaps he hasn't.
"You know, Adrian's team. We need someone to test this stuff don't we!"
He frowns slightly. "Do we? No-one mentioned that to me."
I sit back.

Eventually they manage to connect to the Internet, but for some reason Outlook cannot connect.

The Inept Host is now, at someone's suggestion, setting up a Webex in order to share his screen and is in the process of requesting a password reset email since he has forgotten his password, and Network Guy 1 had told him to clear his cookies. No-one has remembered that he is unable to access his email so will be unable to receive the new password.

20 minutes into the hour-long meeting the laptop remembers that it in fact does know the WiFi network, the document is circulated, and we begin.

There is no agenda, but minutes for this meeting (were anyone taking minutes) could read something like this:
- Tedious walk-through of a document which everyone was supposed to have already read.
- Heated discussion around a minor point which Loudmouth knows a lot about. Action: Junior Developer has to ensure code correlates with an obscure standard, presumably in case we decide that this [2 week ill-conceived, poorly-thought-through hack inspired by short-term thinkers in the business with a dismal record in shrewd decisions] is such a good piece of software we may one day decide to put our logo on it and take it to market as an off-the-shelf product.
- Back Office Guy [who arrived, grinning, 46 minutes in] raised the fact that the proposed global solution won't work in the back office in the APAC region [despite his team being invited to all previous meetings, and invited to collaborate on and review all the documents]. Action: Meeting Nomad to "assess the impact" of this [even though we already understand the impact. But this gives him something to do in his next meeting.]
- All agreed that we should organise another meeting for next week to "review the actions from this meeting", and "see where we are" [which will be the same place we are now, but a week closer to the deadline].

As I leave the meeting I speculate on how I might transition to the role of Inept Meeting Host, or Loudmouth and save myself the stress of trying to do a good job. Perhaps there's a work shadowing programme?

Oh wait, I'm late for my next meeting.

I no longer need to remember

So I've got all this stuff in "the cloud". It's great, I don't need to worry about backing it up because some gigantic company has set up a trillion servers in vast glacier-chilled vaults to protect my electronic assets. In case of a nuclear world war my letter to British Gas will be safe and sound, as will the holiday snaps from Northumberland and the picture my friend sent me of the guy with the funny tattoos. These files are replicated hundreds of times to ensure they're not lost - and I have no doubt that future civilisations will be able to read my letter to British Gas and fully appreciate, even across the passage of centuries, how annoying that problem with my bill really was.

This, for me, is the beauty of the cloud.

Now of course I'm being slightly facetious - clearly cloud computing represents a huge leap forward in how we think about IT provisioning, and companies are increasingly considering it to reduce the financial overheads of maintaining hardware, and outsource the expertise required to properly manage scalability, security and so on.
But for the home user, what really has changed (apart from the word Cloud popping up everywhere)? There are companies offering services and storage online, same as there were ten or fifteen years ago. They're just different services, and they now offer more storage.
Take, for example, webmail. The fundamental tenets of cloud are true: it's stored and managed out there on the Internet. I need not concern myself with how or where. It will no doubt be replicated on many servers, and I neither know nor care which server is serving up my email about vi4gr4, or the eight hundred emails from Groupon I've received that day.

But now, here's an idea. While online and social media companies continue to persuade us to share our every mindless thought or opinion, keep a note of everything and everyone we encounter (by the way, Evernote team: I am emphatically NOT going to start photographing everyone I meet. That is truly ridiculous), and store images of everything we see to share with our friends, the obvious extrapolation of that trend is this: wire our brains up to the Internet to store our every experience into the cloud. An online memory of everything we do, think, see or feel. CloudMemory (TM). (It's not really a trademark by the way, I just made it up - although I think there is a kind of mattress called this).

It's not a very original idea - I'm sure it's featured in sci-fi movies, and Google are probably developing it as we speak, but consider the advantages below (there must be thousands, but these are the ones with the most profound implications for humankind):

• Never worry about printing out your train or flight confirmation again. Having looked at it once, forever after just look it up from CloudMemory.
• "Who is that actor? I've definitely seen him in something recently. Oh wait, I can just retrieve it from my online memory using CloudMemory (TM)!"
• Ever wonder what you just came upstairs to get? Just look it up on your iPhone using the CloudMemory app.
• "Hey, remember that great time we had in Majorca?" "No. I no longer need to remember that time."

There are also some lesser advantages, such as:

• World peace could be brought about. I don't know how, but I'm pretty sure CloudMemory would help.
• Crimes could be solved by allowing people to share certain memories with restricted people, to prove their alibi or version of events is true. It must have been difficult for Murdoch and Coulson, for instance, trying to help the Leveson inquiry but cruelly blighted by a failing memory. They could certainly have benefitted from CloudMemory.
• 2000 years from now no one will be able to claim the existence of visiting deity without providing proof in the form of a hyperlink to an archived online memory. "A reading from the first letter of Saint Phil to the inhabitants of Milton Keynes: And so it was that Bob Holness flew down from heaven in a hexagonal spaceship, to save our mortal souls. But don't take my word for it; see footage here: http://bit.ly/JJmHxd ". That sort of thing.

So you see that CloudMemory could be the next big thing (well, there might be some more big things first I guess, like the iPhone 5 with a slightly thinner case, or someone else offering online movie rentals).

<hilarious ending gag>
So I'm off to file my patent for, erm, what was it again?
</hilarious ending gag>