The Tragedie Of Maureen, Ladie Of The Register
Scott Gardner ·
NINJASIGNAL MIC DROPS Hey, my graph is full of TI intel you wont get anywhere else :-)
As it was Playd before the Board, and Markd Greene, and Closd with Evidence
Newly set forth from the Folio held at the Institute of Things That Are Probably Fine, with such corrections as the Institute felt able to afford.
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
MAUREEN — Ladie of the Register; second of the three lines of defence, and first to lunch.
DAVE — of Procurement; a clicker of links; well-meaning; doom.
NIKO — a Summariser; who doth the mouth; hollow, but confident, and therefore promoted.
MARTIN — an Approver. Deceased, or never living; his audit trail yet spotless.
GAVIN — a Lord of Middling Governance; owner of nothing; chair of everything.
KEV — absent. In Portugal. Upon a boat.
THREE AUDITORS — weird sisters of the third line.
A BOARD — who nod.
CHORUS — of the Institute of Things That Are Probably Fine.
Also: Ticketes, Artefactes, Compensating Controls, and other Attendants.
PROLOGUE
Enter CHORUS.
CHORUS Two systems, both alike in dignity, In fair Estate, where we do lay our scene, Share one account, one password, and one key, And no man owns them, and the fields are green. From forth the fatal inbox of the age A star-cross'd link doth take his fatal click, Whose misadventured passage 'cross our stage Shall make the register both long and thick. The fearful transit of residual risk, The auditor's approach, the boardroom's chill, The lunch that no alarum makes more brisk — Is now the two hours' traffic of our quill. Then sit, and mark; and if you mark it true, All shall be fine. We have a slide to prove it.
Exit.
ACT I
SCENE I. A council chamber. A screen. A register.
Enter GAVIN, MAUREEN, DAVE, and NIKO.
GAVIN Good morrow, friends. Is the register refresh'd?
MAUREEN It is refresh'd, my lord. I have refresh'd it. The dates that stood in April stand in June, And those in June are carried to a month Not yet invented, which we christen Q3.
GAVIN And what of risk two hundred forty-one — The one that saith the crown jewels lie unwatch'd?
MAUREEN Ay. That one. That one's green.
GAVIN Green?
MAUREEN Most green. I have appended thereunto a note, And in the note a comfort, and within That comfort, nothing; but the note is there, And notes are evidence, and evidence Is what the auditor doth feed upon, And so the auditor is fed, and I To lunch.
GAVIN But is the risk itself reduced?
MAUREEN My lord, you ask a question of the risk. I speak of the rating. These are distant kin Who do not speak, and were not at the wedding.
NIKO If I may summarise —
GAVIN Pray do.
NIKO It is directionally positive. There are themes. Three themes. I shall not name them, for the naming Is in the annex, and the annex is In flight.
GAVIN Most excellent. Then we are assured. Let it be minuted that we are assured. (aside) Assurance is a thing that, being minuted, Requires no further evidence of being.
DAVE My lords, a small thing troubles me.
ALL Speak, Dave.
DAVE There came an invoice to me in the night, Address'd to me, and knowing of my name, And of the project, and the sum thereof, And of the supplier, and my line manager, And of my dog.
MAUREEN Then plainly it is real. No stranger knows a dog.
DAVE It hath a link.
GAVIN Dave. Dave. We have a policy on links.
DAVE I know it, lord. I have attested to it. Twice. In a module. With a certificate. I got fourteen from twenty and it said Congratulations, you are now aware.
NIKO And awareness, once conferred, cannot be lost. It is a sacrament.
GAVIN Then all is well. Dave, use your judgement.
Exeunt GAVIN and NIKO.
MAUREEN Dave. Do not. (She marks something green, and exits.)
DAVE (alone) What light through yonder attachment breaks? It is a PDF, and it is small, And smallness is a kind of innocence. (He clicks.) It asks For my credentials. Well — it asked politely.
Alarum within. A wind. Somewhere, a domain controller sighs.
Exit DAVE.
ACT II
SCENE I. A corridor. Ticketing systems groan offstage.
Enter MAUREEN, with a laptop.
MAUREEN To accept, or to mitigate: that is the question — Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous phishing, Or to take arms against a sea of tickets And, by opposing, close them. To close: to sign; No more; and by a sign to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That legacy is heir to — 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be minuted. To close: to sign; To sign, perchance to own — ay, there's the rub; For in that ownership what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this RACI chart Must give us pause. There's the respect That makes us rather bear the risk we have Than fly to owners that we know not of. Who would these fardels bear, when he might write Accepted by the business in a box And go, unmolested, into Wednesday? Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with pale amber cast, And enterprises of great pith and moment Turn awry, and lose the name of project, And are re-baselined. Soft you now. The finding cometh. Get thee to a workshop.
Enter DAVE, pale, holding a phone at arm's length as one holds a wasp.
DAVE Maureen. Maureen. The invoice was not real.
MAUREEN Dave, hush. Was it approved?
DAVE It was approved.
MAUREEN By whom?
DAVE By Martin.
MAUREEN Then we are saved. Martin approves. It is his nature. Show me.
DAVE Approved at fourteen minutes after three Upon the morning of the eleventh day.
MAUREEN He was on leave upon the eleventh day.
DAVE He was.
MAUREEN He was in Wales.
DAVE He was. And yet the record standeth, and it standeth Cleaner than any record I have seen. No amendment. No delegation. No Correction. Perfect. Perfect as a tomb.
Thunder. Enter the GHOST OF MARTIN, in full compliance.
GHOST OF MARTIN I am thy father's approver, doom'd for a term To sign the nights away, and in the day Be absent from all meetings where I'm named. List, Dave, list! I never read a thing. Not one. Not once. In nineteen years I signed Four thousand, and I read the subject lines, And sometimes only half of those, and once I signed a lunch order as a change request, And it went live, and no one ever knew, And it is still in production. Ask me why My trail is spotless.
DAVE Why is thy trail so spotless?
GHOST OF MARTIN Because no man e'er audits what is closed. Adieu, adieu. Remember me. And put me down as consulted, not accountable.
Exit GHOST.
MAUREEN (after a pause, gently) Dave. I have marked it green.
DAVE What, all of it?
MAUREEN All of it, Dave. And now I go to lunch.
Exeunt.
ACT III
SCENE I. A blasted heath, being an open-plan floor with the lights on a sensor.
Thunder. Enter THREE AUDITORS.
FIRST AUDITOR When shall we three meet again?
SECOND AUDITOR When the evidence is late.
THIRD AUDITOR That is now. That was always now.
FIRST AUDITOR Round about the sample go; In the tested items throw — Screenshot of a config page, Undated, and of unknown age; Policy, unread, unsigned, Owner left, replacement blind; Ticket clos'd with see above, Where above is nought thereof;
ALL THREE Double, double, scope and trouble; Caveat rise and finding bubble.
SECOND AUDITOR Green is red, and red is green; Hover through the RAG, unseen.
Exeunt. Enter NIKO, to a BOARD.
NIKO Friends, colleagues, stakeholders, lend me your ears. I come to bury Dave, not to upskill him. The evil that men click lives after them; The good is oft interred with their handover. So let it be with Dave. The noble Gavin Hath told you Dave was culpable. If so, It was a grievous culpability, And Gavin is an honourable chair. Here is the policy Dave attested to. I will not read it to you — it is long, And in a font that no man loves — but here, Mark here: he did attest. He did. He scored Fourteen from twenty, which is satisfactory, And satisfactory is what we bought. I am no orator, as Maureen is; But were I Maureen, and Maureen were Niko, There were a Maureen should stir up your souls And put you all in scope — which God forbid, For scope is where the money goes to die. In summary: three themes. A journey. Learnings. The tone at top was strong. The tone below Was also, in its way, a kind of tone. We have identified an opportunity.
A BOARD (nod)
NIKO The nodding is sufficient. Log the nodding.
Exeunt.
ACT IV
SCENE I. A war room. Whiteboard. Cold pastries. Hour eleven.
Enter GAVIN, armed with a printout.
GAVIN Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by a compensating control! Bring forth the compensating control!
A silence.
Bring it!
A longer silence.
A control! A control! My kingdom for a control! We had one. We had one in twenty-two. It was a person. Kev. Kev was the control. Kev looked at things and said that isn't right, And things were then not wrong. We call that Kev. We had no name for it, and so we cut it. Where is Kev?
MAUREEN Portugal. There is a boat.
GAVIN Then we are naked to the enemy, And must go bravely. Gather. Nearer. Closer. This day is call'd the day of the assessment. He that outlives this day and comes safe home Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named, And say I was in scope, and I survived. Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he'll remember, with advantages, What tickets he clos'd on that Friday night. We few, we happy few, we band of second line — For he to-day that shares his evidence with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so junior, This day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England, now abed, Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speaks That did the mapping to Annex A.
MAUREEN (quietly) My lord, the deadline is a Tuesday.
GAVIN Tuesday. Ay. Well. It scans less well.
Exit GAVIN.
SCENE II. Night. MAUREEN, sleepwalking, with a laptop.
MAUREEN Out, damned finding! out, I say! One; two. Why then 'tis time to do't. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie! A second line, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can Call our register to account? — Yet here's a spot. Here's amber. Here. Here, on the summary tab. I have re-rated it. I have re-scored it. I have appended, and appended, and appended. All the perfumes of the evidence pack Will not sweeten this one cell. Q3, And Q3, and Q3, Creeps in this petty pace from board to board To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty spreadsheets. Out, out, brief slide! Life's but a walking workshop, a poor player That struts and hovers his one hour upon the call And then is muted; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of RAG and heat map, Signifying nothing. To bed. To bed. To bed. There's knocking at the gate.
Knocking. Three knocks. She marks the cell green and closes the laptop.
Exit.
ACT V
SCENE I. The chamber, as at first. All as at first.
Enter GAVIN, MAUREEN, NIKO, and DAVE, who has been given a certificate.
GAVIN The report is landed. Read the headline finding.
NIKO Management has demonstrated commitment.
GAVIN And the substance?
NIKO There is no substance section. There is an appendix. It is not for us.
GAVIN Then all is well. And Dave?
DAVE I am aware. More aware than before. I have a badge.
MAUREEN And risk two hundred forty-one is closed.
GAVIN Closed how?
MAUREEN Closed green. Closed with evidence. The evidence Being that it has been open long enough To be considered, by the register, A feature of the landscape. Like a hill. One does not remediate a hill, my lord. One walks around it, and one writes it down, And after twenty years one calls it heritage.
Enter a MESSENGER, with a letter.
MESSENGER From Portugal, my lord.
GAVIN Read it. Read it out.
MESSENGER (reads; and here the verse gives up, as verse does)
Gav — got your seventeen emails. The password's on the whiteboard behind the door in the third floor comms room, has been since 2019, I told four people and one of them was Martin so make of that what you will. The alerting was never turned on, only turned green. I'm not coming back. The boat is fine. The boat is genuinely, actually fine, which I understand is a difficult concept for you.
A silence. GAVIN folds the letter carefully.
GAVIN Log it as feedback. Thank him for his input. Add it as received. Not as actioned. Received. Received is very nearly the same word.
Exeunt all but CHORUS, who has been there the whole time, taking notes.
EPILOGUE
CHORUS Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all governance, And, like the baseless fabric of this heat map, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous target states, The solemn programmes, the great transformation Itself, and all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial workshop, leave not A rack behind. We are such stuff As slide decks are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep — a sleep of thirty days, Then auto-closed. Be not afraid. The isle Is full of noises: alerts, and none of them Attended; sounds and sweet airs, that give delight And hurt not, for we have suppressed the ones that hurt. If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended: That the register is green, And the auditor has been, And the finding is deferred, And the risk owner has not heard, And the breach that ate the crown Is a hill, and written down. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Maureen shall restore amends — Not now. She's out. She has a thing. It's fine. It's probably fine.
FINIS.
EDITORIAL NOTES
I.i. The Quarto reads compliant where the Folio reads complaint. We follow the Folio, on the grounds that it is funnier and that the Institute's funding for scholarship expired in March.
II.i. Several editors have proposed that the GHOST OF MARTIN is a mere projection of institutional anxiety and has no independent existence. The Institute rejects this reading: Martin appears in the audit trail four thousand times, which is four thousand more times than most of us, and the Institute considers documentation the highest available form of being.
IV.i. Kev was the control. Some texts give Kev was a control, the indefinite article implying replaceability. Every organisation that has adopted this reading has subsequently discovered that it was, in fact, the definite one.
V.i. The stage direction and here the verse gives up, as verse does is not present in any early text and is the editor's own. It is retained because it is true.
From the collected works of the Institute of Things That Are Probably Fine. No controls were harmed in the making of this play, as no controls were present.
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