This week, I had the pleasure of travelling down to London to meet up with my colleague and fellow editor Andy Lee, who had booked a rather salubrious conference room at Centaur Headquarters in which to hold our editorial discussion.

Now Andy and I are very different individuals. When I speak, I tend to use highly animated hand waving gestures, whilst Andy is less of a flamboyant and more static fellow who does not need to act as if there is a bunch of itching powder down his trousers just to get his points of view across.

For a while, the meeting appeared to be going well. At least, while I was speaking, it did. Because, unfortunately, when it was Andy’s turn to talk, which he did for perhaps less than four or five minutes, all the lights in that particular conference room went out.

I thought that there had been a power cut. But looking out of the office window to determine whether this was in fact the case or not, I saw that the rest of my colleagues on The Engineer were still bathing in the rather iridescent glow of the overhead lighting.

Turning back to face Andy again, I noticed that suddenly he had become intensely animated, waving his hands around in all directions, seemingly without purpose.

For one moment, I thought some unfortunate malady had afflicted my fellow editor. But I need not have worried. For the reason behind Andy’s seemingly incomprehensible gestures was that he was simply acting to initiate a sensor in the room to turn the lighting back on.

The responsible folks that own Centaur had figured, quite rightly, that they could save money, and help the environment too, by alleviating the need for individuals who used the conference room to shut the lights off after they had finished using it.

And so they had installed the electronic sensor to detect if there was any movement in the place. And if there wasn’t, the sensor would instruct the microprocessor controlled lighting to shut itself off.

The problem was, of course, that the Powers That Be had reckoned that all the members of the staff were highly animated characters like me, and not that some were more sober and conservative individuals like Andy. And that was their fatal mistake.

When I returned home after our meeting, I decided to propose a new system that would solve the problem of the irritating conference room lighting. My more intelligent system would use a camera and image recognition system to identify the individuals that entered the room, and based on their personality profile would tailor the behaviour of the lighting accordingly.

Of course, when I suggested such a system be deployed to Andy, he ridiculed me for throwing good money after bad. But I don’t see the problem. Looking around our industry today, I can see many examples of where that sort of behaviour seems perfectly acceptable.
This comment was originally published in the Engineeringtalk Newsletter