“The ideal candidate doesn’t have a 9 to 5 mentality.”

I have an idea I may have stolen that line from the very talented artist/illustrator/author Andrea Benko – ah, apparently I did. (As well as plundering Oscar Wilde’s dramatic oeuvre for the title of this article.) However, I really did have a departmental manager in A Certain IT Unit – at a medical research charity, if it matters – who dropped a very similar remark into the conversation when he took me to the pub for an informal getting-to-know-you chat.

“I can’t say this, but I’d be very disappointed if my staff always left the office at 5pm sharp.”

Fast forward a decade and a half. I was in a hotel in Bratislava. I was on one of those conference mini-breaks where you spend three days in the US, one at home, three more in the Far East, then two more somewhere in Europe. Of course, I’m not even trying to calculate the additional days spent travelling. But this time I’d left home in the early hours to travel halfway across England to get to Heathrow, waited around there for several hours, then taken not one but two flights to get to Bratislava because there wasn’t a direct flight. So I was ready for an early night. I don’t speak Slovak (or even Czech), so local TV was probably not going to keep me awake.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet turned my work phone off – in fact, I rarely did in those days.

DDDDRRRRNNNNGGGG!!!!!!!

It was a PR droid-in-charge (of something or other, but not me…) in the US, wanting me to talk to a high-profile journalist/influencer about some current security brouhaha. And he, fresh as a McFlurry on a bright morning in San Diego, couldn’t believe that an ageing security maven a million time zones away was in bed, rather than jumping at the opportunity to talk security to a professional sceptic who was always going to adapt anything I said to him to fit his preconceptions*.

“But it’s only 9pm over there!”

I should have told him to go forth and multiply (after sharing a couple of home truths about whose manager he wasn’t), but I’ve always been too polite for my own good, and I did do the interview. And I was quoted in such a way as to fit the journalist’s preconceptions…

By the time I actually retired, that cellphone had gone to the great Cellphone Warehouse in the sky, but one of the first habits I broke myself of was leaving my cellphone on overnight. If you need to talk to me urgently, use my landline. If you don’t know my landline number, it’s not ex-directory, but you probably have no reason to speak to me urgently anyway.

*I’m not going to name the journalist, who is, after all, a very competent writer with a genuine understanding of security issues. All I can say is, “he’s not the Messiah, but he’s far from the naughtiest boy in the media.”

David Harley