He'd just got me to do an analysis of the company's international telephone bill to ascertain what I already knew: that we were spending thousands on calls to places where we didn't have offices, but where the staff did have families and friends. Then FD read this article which basically said "VoIP means free calls anywhere in the world" and his eyes lit up like our web server when the Telegraph Fantasy Football points are updated.
I'm no web geek but even I got the point that VoIP offers cheap (or sometimes free) calls by routing them over the Internet rather than via the conventional telephone circuits. In fact, having one network for both voice and data has plenty of other advantages, such as easier conference calls and automatic diversion of calls to mobiles.
As usual, he designated himself to meet all of the suppliers and it was left to me to input all the data and generate a budget and returns evaluation for the board. It was obvious the analysis was going to be highly positive. Once we'd paid for the new exchange kit in our various buildings, the rest was a series of zeros.
But while I was slaving away at my desk, FD suddenly found himself with lots of new toys "loaned" to him by suppliers drooling at the prospect of a multi-site installation - including a state-of-the-art laptop that simply oozed geek chic. I could forgive him the golfing trips and the local Chamber of Commerce black-tie dinner dance and tombola. But the swanky laptop - with VoIP and wi-fi already built in, so he could see how it worked - really got up my nose.
Worse, it was giving him ideas about taking Blaminio into the digital age and embracing remote working.
The profits of the local Cafe Caligula rocketed as he spent hours there conducting teleconferences with Blaminio's divisional FDs. Every time he returned to the office, he kept on telling me how fortunate we were that he had found VoIP just in time for the cross-border budget cycle. Hard to imagine what the usual clientele - wealthy housewives who abandon their 4x4s on the nearby pedestrian crossing so they can spar about little Jocasta's grade six piano and moan about their useless husbands making pots of money in the City - made of this chubby bloke in an ill-fitting pinstripe and a bluetooth headset muttering about EBITDA and year-end reconciliations.
Then suddenly he was back in the office on his normal phone and the laptop was no more. Huh?
I only worked out why he'd had this change of heart when I wandered into the coffee shop to buy a vanilla and mango boosterccino and started chatting up the barrista. FD had come in a couple of days before, bought his usual small decaflatte and settled down for a heavy VoIP session. Then, panic. He'd lost his bluetooth headset, and with no time left before the conference call with the stroppy chairman, he'd had to conduct the whole thing with the state-of-the-art laptop clamped to the side of his head - like it was a 1985-vintage mobile phone, or some kind of portable MRI scanner.
The rest of the coffee shop gradually
fell into silence, staring at this red-faced bloke who'd wrapped his head
in £2,350 worth of dark-grey plastic, and
was shouting incoherent accounting gobbledegook. Result? He can't bear to be
seen in there again, which means no remote working for him, or anyone else.
And he's suddenly decided that maybe the reliable old technology - ordinary
phones "which everyone already knows how to use" - are the way forward.