It’s a team effort: you type the semicolons, I’ll do the curly brackets

Hmm, tricky. A senior colleague at work gave me a deadline of tomorrow morning but all my conscious thought is transfixed by what I’m watching on television.

When I say "senior colleague", it’s just a polite euphemism for "clock-watcher on payroll" but it amuses me to be patronising. He flinched a bit when I first called him "boss" but quickly got used to it, at which point I switched to "skipper". When he warmed to this one, I shortened it to "skip".

Since then we have passed through "guv", "chief", "cap" and "champ", followed by "top cat", "el pres", "dark lord" and (my favourite) "big mama". I once recklessly addressed him as "Obi-wan" which had the effect of making him blush and produce a funny squeak from deep in his throat. I won’t do that again. It was not the epithet I was looking for.

To be fair, he deserves respect: despite being even further out of his depth than I am, he still manages to get himself hired as a full-time employee and thereby benefit from sick pay, holiday pay, pension, furlough – the lot. As a freelance gun-for-hire, I get none of these. So while I console myself with a thumping day rate and a generous discount on my health insurance (apparently the self-employed tend to be less ill than salaried staff), it’s only natural that I should sink to the bottom of the project hierarchy.

My senior colleague had pulled me aside for a quiet word at the beginning of the week. He asked if I could knock together a script to make something work on the system as it was supposed to. When I say "as it was supposed to" I mean of course "as it had been promised it could already do when the idea was sold to the board of directors two years ago".

Scripting. Hmm, tricky. That’s not my strong point, although to be honest I’m hard-pressed to determine what such a thing might actually be. Not some media ingesty Perly loopy metadatery script, I hope, as I wouldn’t have a clue.

Wearing my best poker face I ask "JavaScript?" as if that made a difference. I might know nothing about Perl but I do know enough about JavaScript to know I’m rubbish at it.

Wearing a face that would give the game away during a low-stakes Happy Families, Dopy-wan blurts "Er… yeah, right, JavaScript," and follows it up unnecessarily and unconvincingly with "That’s it, yes. I want a JavaScript."

Why would he ask me to do this, I wonder for a nanosecond before spotting the glossy temples and lines of desperation around his eyes. Ah, I see it. Someone else on the team who has more seniority must have asked him to write a script to patch up the latest leak that’s slowly but surely pissing away all chances of a go-live before Santa hits town. He must have been too ashamed to admit he can’t do it, then come to me for help.

Excellent.

Advising him that such a thing is outside the remit of my officially agreed duties as a contractor, I suggest we go and ask Project Manager Tina for permission to alter my contract. He almost squeals in panic. Right then, I pretend to suggest off the top of my head and conjuring immense willpower not to wring my hands at the same time, how about you commission me privately? A Monkey* will be fine, I say to him; it’ll give me something to do on Sunday afternoon, I think to myself.

It is now Sunday night and I haven’t even started. Instead, on a whim, I have been binge-watching the original series of The X Files. It was all the rage back when I worked on the ill-fated and craply named but warmly remembered magazine Computer Life but I never got around to watching it. This is a shame since I even recorded a full-length alien abduction audio adventure, complete with anal probe, for the cover CD without ever witnessing a single episode.

Let me confess straight up that I don’t think The X Files is very good. However, it is fascinating as a kind of pop-cultural timecapsule of mid 1990s assumptions of what hi-tech looks like. This, for example, is what is revealed on Agent Mulder’s vast and boxy CRT computer display:

When Agent Scully looked at this screen, she put on her quizzical face. No, not the incredulous face, the other one. And I don’t blame her: I’ve been staring at this screenshot half the night and I still don’t understand what it’s telling me. It’s as if I’m seeing an object with which I should be perfectly familiar - a DOS hard disk root directory listing in wide format - but which doesn’t make sense any more. Tricky.

Is it because I have forgotten my basic DOS command lines? Surely not. Have I forgotten how to count to 39? Possibly. Might it be because I am watching the episode badly dubbed into French? Could be. Or is it because I have been playing a drinking game in which I down a shot of undiluted Pastis 51 every time Mulder takes his enormous cell phone from his inside jacket pocket and (important detail coming up) yanks out the antenna before answering?

Definitely. Because Mulder does this at least 20 times per episode and maintenant je suis culé-de-rat.**

Feel for poor old Foxy: while 1960s Shatner could flip from the hip in a Star Fleet future, Mulder was rooted among chain-smoking ESP alien eelmen in the 1990s still talking into a brick.

I switch off Amazon Base and sway over to my home office. I’ll drop a line to my senior colleague to warn him the script might be a little late.

Except… I can’t seem to see through the fog of abusive messages that is still relentlessly pouring into the Antonio Bay of my inbox ever since I addressed someone with the words "Look, Karen" during a social media interaction. Unfortunately, pointing out that I was chatting with someone whose name happened to be ‘Karen’ didn’t clear things up, as my messaging services continue to be swamped by wave after wave of cancellation hex. Ah sod it, leave it until tomorrow.

Now it’s Monday morning. Tricky. My senior colleague is getting whiney, not helped by me calling him "Las Pelotas" which I nevertheless consider to be my most valuable contribution to date on behalf of the team towards supporting cross-gender issues. I do feel a bit embarrassed for turning up empty-handed after he had put his trust in my scripting skills, albeit misplaced because I have none.

A more senior dude on the team slips silently into the project room like a ninja, sidles up to Mr Spanishbollocks and stage-whispers into his ear: "Do you have that script I paid you for? I mean, I paid half up front. The other £500 is only after delivery."

My embarrassment evaporates. So that’s it: he got hired cash-in-hand to write some JavaScript and immediately subcontracted it to someone else, i.e. me. And at half price.

At that moment, the senior dude’s line manager struts in. "I want my script!" he bellows at the former. "You charged me two tonnes last week and I need it now!" Dude looks despairingly at his junior colleague, then curiously at me as I stand up to get a better view. We stare back. Then all three of us look at the line manager.

He too turns at the squeak of door hinges as we witness Project Manager Tina floating in on a wave of spirituality. The room falls silent as she offers a prayer of gratitude for that morning’s "gifts from the immaterial plane" – by which I can only assume she means the carpet-tile-charged static shock that jabs under one’s fingernails when touching the office door handle. We all grunt "Amen" (as I quietly slip the rubber gloves on my desk into my back pocket.)

Gracefully she looks up from the floor and turns to the line manager.

"Right," she chirps, "Where’s my facking five-grand script?"

ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. Inspiration for this week’s episode comes courtesy of the notorious true-clife crime story in which a hitman subcontracted a hired killing to a cheaper hitman, who then subcontracted an even cheaper hitman, who then did the same thing to another, who then did it again. All five lazy Leons were sent to jail and, unlike my JavaScript, the final hit never materialised. How come nobody has made this into a movie?

* £500** rat-arsed****** not a real expression