It was in September 1964 that he started at Dexter Computers Inc. as a trainee systems engineer. Actually, he had applied for a job at the colossus, the Big Machine Company, but was turned down. Surprising when he had done so well at all the interviews. In fact the last interviewer, as immaculately groomed as all the others, and as generous with the white-toothed smile, gave him the thumbs up. But Flambard blew it when the branch manager had him to lunch - the company's pre-acceptance ceremony.
"And what will you have?" the man asked, as the waiter stood poised with pad in hand.
"Oh, just a beer thanks very much."
And that was the end of that. Poor Flambard, how was he to know that the Supreme Helmsman, the mystical founder of Big Machine Company, had decreed that every employee, from vice-president to lowly minion, whether at home or at work, must abide by the company's First Commandment:
Thou shalt not consume even a thimbleful of the distillate of rye, barley, or corn; or the fermentate of grape, be it red, white, rose; or any of the pilseners, lagers, or ales, top or bottome brewed.
At Dexter Computers, Flambard moved ahead in overdrive. Within a year he was given charge of implementing the company's new super software - RELEASOR. The work of a genius, RELEASOR could manipulate programs written for any Big Machine computer so that they could be understood by Dexter machines. By the purest coincidence, in the same quarter that Dexters came out with RELEASOR, they announced a major breakthrough in magnetic tape technology, a lightning fast mass storage system far superior to anything else on the market. The company went all out hitting its competitors, especially Big Machine Company, as hard as it could, and full speed ahead before they themselves were leapfrogged by some even more astounding technological innovation.
And so Flambard found himself flying to every corner of the Midwest, the Atlantic seaboard, the South, his briefcase bulging with RELEASOR system manuals. To see him in the boarding line, so nonchalant, so businesslike, you'd think that he'd long got past the stage when his stomach shrank the instant his boarding pass was thrust at him. Not so. He never quite made it into the ranks of the fortunate few for whom flying had become so routine that they gave not a second thought to the ever recurring cycle of disasters such as when Nippon Air's ill-fated 727 was almost immediately followed by Canadian Pacific's DC8 and then Braniff's BAC111, the latter much played out by the media for breaking apart in turbulence and sending forty-two full-blooded Americans hurtling to the rocks and pinnacles of the Black Hills of Wyoming.
