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funk in the air, which I suspect emanates from Darryl.
    We face a long wooden table pushed against the wall. At the centre is an old, unimpressive Dell computer, an LCD monitor, and a dusty keyboard.
    The three of us stare at the screen, watching in silence as the computer chugs through the interminable Microsoft Windows start-up process.
    ‘You ever think,’ Darryl says, ‘how much time we spend, watching computers boot? I mean, as a society.’
    Randy shoots Darryl a look.
    ‘Hundreds of man-years,’ Darryl continues. ‘Wasted. Watching the boot-up screen. We could have built a cathedral in the same amount of time. Or cured cancer. Or put a man on
Mars.’
    ‘I’m sure Jim doesn’t want to hear your thoughts about this, Darryl.’ From his tone, Randy has a clear idea whom he wants to volunteer for that first manned mission to
Mars.
    Darryl shrugs. ‘Just saying.’
    After what seems like eternity, the computer plays a friendly tone to indicate it is ready for use.
    ‘All right,’ Darryl says. ‘May I?’ He rubs his hands together, steps up to the keyboard, and cracks his knuckles like a concert pianist.
    He types. A window appears on the screen. It’s grey, undecorated, without the professional finish that adorns commercial software programs. In plain block letters it says: ‘TAO
SOFTWARE – GENERATION 2.0 – P-SCAN SERVICE – ALPHA RELEASE – SVN BUILD 1262.’
    Darryl explains, ‘So this is it. At first, we called it Passive Image Scanning Service. David spent like twenty grand on the brochures, but then someone realized the acronym spelled
P.I.S.S., so we had to throw those out and reprint them. We changed the name, too.’
    ‘Smart,’ I say.
    ‘We call it P-Scan now,’ Darryl says. ‘Want me to show you how it works?’
    Randy puts his hand on Darryl’s shoulder and squeezes, in what surely is an attempt to tell his protégé to pause, and to allow Randy to take it from here. But Darryl is
oblivious to subtlety. The younger man almost shouts, ‘Hey, dude, you’re squeezing too tight!’
    Randy ignores this. Still gripping Darryl, but looking straight at me, Randy says: ‘I just want to go on record and say this is a very early alpha release. It’s not fully functional,
and it probably won’t even work.’
    ‘Understood, Randy,’ I say.
    Randy pauses, considering whether another round of ass-covering and expectation-lowering is required. He decides not. He nods at Darryl and says, ‘Go ahead.’
    ‘OK,’ Darryl says. He speaks quickly, excitedly. ‘Like I said, this is generation two. Generation one was released two years ago, and it was pretty good.’ He stops,
realizes something. He turns to me. ‘Hey, Jim, you know what the software does, right?’
    Not really. It may surprise you to learn that a turnaround executive seldom cares about the product his company makes. He’s not a technologist; he’s not a programmer; he’s not
a salesperson. His speciality – the products he cares about – are companies. By the time a turnaround CEO arrives, the problem is larger than any single product, or any software
release, or any botched sales effort. The problem is the company itself. It’s like being a doctor for a patient whose body is riddled by cancers. Concentrating on any single organ is useless.
More important is to improve the remaining days, to try to make the whole last longer.
    I lie: ‘I know what the product does. But why don’t you tell me, in your own words.’
    Asking a programmer to describe software in his own words is like asking a salty old admiral to describe his favourite sea battle: surely, an account of the enemy’s maritime manoeuvres, of
the position of the sun in the sky, of the wind in the rigging, is fascinating only to one person in the room.
    So allow me to summarize Darryl’s speech.
    Tao’s product belongs to a software category called ‘passive image recognition’. That’s a fancy way of saying what it really does, which is quite