Performing Beyond Expectations

There is a white plastic box on the wall of a farmhouse porch in Aberdeenshire, four feet up, next to the coats. On the front of it are four small lights. Three of them are green.

When the fourth one is red, the internet does not work.

That is the entire diagnostic apparatus, and over the fourteen months that follow it turns out to be more reliable than anything else in this book.

Raymond reports that light to his provider. His provider tests the line at a moment when it happens to be working, observes that it is working, and closes the fault. Then does it again. And again. Once the fault is closed overnight by a piece of software that signs its own notes. Three times it is closed with the words You have told us that your fault was fixed, which he never said, on days when he said the opposite in writing.

Then one afternoon an email arrives to say that his line is performing beyond expectations.

It is not. An engineer had stood in the yard the previous morning with a meter and found a fault. Six days later a damaged fibre is discovered affecting fourteen households.

And a month after all that is finally put right, a car hits a pole at the crossroads, and everything gets very much worse.

The first of two books.

Performing Beyond Expectations is a comedy about the widening gap between a system that is functioning perfectly and a customer who is not. It is about a man who accidentally becomes the only competent network operations department in the story, armed with a spreadsheet, a script that asks the same question every five minutes for a year, seven photographs of a plastic box, and a growing suspicion that nobody anywhere is actually looking.

Nobody in it is a villain. Everybody is following a process.

The process is insane.

A work of fiction based on a true story. No event in it should be assumed to be true. The physics, unfortunately, is real.