'And so you changed the lights out then?' We linked the lights to the number of items in our work queue – only we found that when we needed to work on a piece of hardware we'd delete all the jobs in the queue so that we'd have enough light to see what we were doing.' 'No, because then we went into the next idea. BOFH: Who us? Sysadmins? Spend time with other departments?.BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons.BOFH: You want presentation layer, but we're physical layer.We might have seen orange once – but we knew the outage was coming before the lights had changed.' 'Only in operation the lights were mostly white or green. 'It does, doesn't it?' I say, tucking into a bhaji. If the lights were white then everything was normal green, things were normal but the trend analysis criteria indicated routine maintenance was required orange, something important had failed and red, critical system failure.'

'The idea was that we could use the lamps to indicate the status of our systems. 'Yes, but ours were replaced with multicolor addressable LED lamps,' I say. 'Everyone's were replaced last year,' he says. 'Take the LED lights in our office which were replaced last year,' I say, grabbing a bunch of bhajis before the Boss can snaffle them all. We implement so many ideas that seem to have useful and practical applications but in practice turn out to be nothing more than cheap trinkets.' 'No, no, we make the same mistakes, just in different ways. 'And I suppose you're above all that?' he snaps back with more than a hint of sulkiness. The excitement half-life of them is measured in weeks, so by this time next year you'll have the new latest iPhone and a different cheap smart watch.' 'They COULD last for years, yes – but they won't.

Their lifetime is so short that even the terms you use to describe them are obsolete in no time.'

'These things,' I say, pointing at his watch and phone, 'are the mayflies of the IT world. I resist the urge to shout at him that the only thing you should be queuing for at midnight is a kebab. 'It talks to my smart phone,' he says, missing most of that. 'Sounds like they knew their customer,' I say. 'And the great thing about this is that it was so cheap! And it has a Gorilla Glass face.'

What defcon level are we at today