I popped home for a couple of days a few weeks ago, and whilst in my old local I bumped into an old school friend, Rob, who I hadn’t seen in over ten years. This is not an every day occurrence, obviously, but after a few seconds of back-slapping and hand shaking, the conversation flowed like it had when I last saw him, back in 1996.

“So what are you up to nowadays Angry?”

“Well Rob, I spend my days trying to convince organisations that they want software they probably don’t need, for sums they can’t afford, in time-frames they can’t achieve.”

“Oh. Right. Do you enjoy it?”

“A little piece of me dies every day Rob. Every. Single. Day.”

“Err..”

“So come on, what do you do? You were always good at French at school.”

“Well I gave that up after our GCSE’s. I work in America most of the time now, I studied Physics and work in the aerospace industry. I spent the first part of my career working on aerodynamics, but nowadays I’m mainly involved in projects with propulsion systems.”

“Propulsion systems?”

“Yeah, it was mainly commercial transportation at first, but recently we’ve been getting involved in military projects, new fighter jet propulsion methods and so on.”

“So, you’re quite literally a rocket scientist then?”

“I guess you could say that, yes!”

“You utter utter cunt.”

The Smith’s sang it best, but I really wonder if that song should have been called, “We hate it when our friends who got worse GCSE results than us become super successful international scientists of some renown, the utter utter cunts”.

Though I do admit that even Morrisey would struggle to make that scan.

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