The Society of Breakers

The evidence is overwhelming

Each month, in a secret basement, the location of which is known only to a few invitees, and then only an hour or so before the start time, the local branch of the Society of Breakers meets.

The Chair calls the gathering to order, the air is pregnant with anticipation. “Who would like to propose the first target?”, he or she asks.

A hand goes up.

“There is a café that is always crowded, turnover is brisk, nearly all of the customers have been there many times before. In short,” — a pause, and a slow look around the room — “it is highly successful.”

After a vote by a show of hands or a barely perceptible nod, this cafe is designated as this month’s targets. Tactics are discussed. Plans are drawn up. The demise of the business is certain.

I have not knowingly met anybody who is a member of the Breakers, but I am convinced that the Society exists. How else to explain the all-too-familiar phenomenon whereby a perfectly operating concern, or product, or system is rendered all but useless, for no reason that anyone can discern?

My most recent experience of this is a digital pen. This has worked perfectly well for years. You write with the pen on special paper. You use the accompanying app to transfer your notes to a Word document, and email it to yourself or an associate. Finally, you use the app to back up the data in the pen to your Google drive (or similar).

Except that now you can do none of those things.

The first indication that someone had infested the whole ecosystem was the emergence of version 2 of the app. This had the unique selling point of making it impossible to access your data at all. However, that was not too much of a problem because version 1 of the app was still available, and functioning.

Now, however, the Breakers have influenced the company concerned to keep the original version of the app available, but with no useful functionality whatsoever. Oh, you can still put data in, via the pen. You just can’t get it out.

This sort of thing happens over and over again.

Take the cafe scenario. There was indeed a cafe just like that, not too far from where I live. It was just an ordinary café, perhaps slightly up-market, but it always had a queue of people waiting to be allowed in. Why? The food was good, reasonably priced, the waiters and waitresses were friendly, the proprietor knew all his customers by name, and greeted them by name.

But he had to sell the business for health reasons. I tried the now differently-owned hostelry. The familiar faces of staff had been replaced. The food was served cold. I asked for it to be heated, which was done with as little grace as they could muster. The food looked the same, but was patently of inferior quality. Within a month of the cafe re-opening under new ownership, the tables lay unoccupied, the line of people waiting for a slot had disappeared, as had all of the regular customers (many of whom I now discovered in other, nearby, cafés).

I visited a school once where the person in charge of technical support was so good that 95% of teachers’ technical problems were solved in a few minutes by a retired bloke on the end of a telephone line. The head of tech support was so good that he was headhunted. Then a new deputy headteacher came in, saw how successful the set-up was, and dismantled it immediately. The result, of course, was as depressing as it was predictable.

I cannot believe that all these stories are unconnected. I cannot prove it, but I am convinced that the Society of Breakers not only exists, but is thriving. Too many brilliantly-working things are screwed up for it all to be coincidence.