As part of the mystical ‘induction’ process for my latest job, I was given instruction on how to lift weights. I admit to being puzzled by this. Has today’s youth managed to survive to adulthood without grounding in this simple art? Old codgers like me are forever looking hopefully for signs of degeneracy in youth but the lifting of weights is an easy one. The maximum acceptable liftable weight has halved to 25 Kg from 1 cwt over the past thirty years, and it used to be twice that. Evidently, from the inspection of a video, the whole method of lifting and carrying weights has changed.

Why should a DBA lift weights? Tush! I once hired a  champion amateur weightlifter-turned-DBA mainly for his weightlifting skills, though he turned out to be an excellent Production DBA who struck terror amongst the developers merely by marching into the open-office area, looking like a dysfunctional Marvel superhero, and mildly asking who was responsible for the long-running query that had locked the main table of the production database and brought it to a halt. I shall never forget the frisson of panic as he menacingly cracked his knuckles. Until, the large production database servers used to be reassuringly solid steel boxes. He could pick them up with contemptuous ease. The servers in the server-room were rearranged with speed and vigour. Being a DBA used to be quite a physical job.

The guy on the video who was demonstrating the acceptable new-labour way of lifting weights commenced the operation by squatting on the ground looking embarrassed whilst staring fixedly into the middle distance. I felt sure this was going to develop into a demonstration of natural childbirth. Then, magically, the chap and his pathetic load (it looked like a pillow) rose into the air purely by the power of straightening his legs. Due to my over-indulgence in French chèvre cheese and rich porter, I’d find it hard even to lift my own body-weight this way. I was expecting to hear the eye-watering twang of some essential ligament snapping on the soundtrack.

Instructional office videos are distracting since one is conditioned nowadays to expect Ricky Gervais to loom into view at any moment. Additionally for a geek, there is the hypnotic thrill of identifying the old computers in the background. Technology dates even faster than mullets, hemlines  or sideburns. Office videos appeal to the technologists just old films of steam engines; for every geek fibre of one’s body is straining to identify the machinery. One spots all sorts of quaint old pcs. I recently saw a pan shot over an old Apricot in an office video. Ah, the glow of nostalgia. I love real steel plate in a Server computer even now. It gives a quite unreasonable reassurance of reliability, like a stone façade on a bank once used to. It is just the lifting of them that causes the difficulty.