Most of you won’t know Sarah. She was the second party in the infamous ChocolateGate scandal and subsequent sugar overload which defused a major diplomatic incident.

Sarah was supposed to be responsible for project governance, but soon turned native and became embroiled in the tissue of lies and web of deceit that passes for our deployment strategy. She was also in charge to blame for creating a spreadsheet of such complexity and depth we’d started to call her Enron. There is more than a mild suspicion that the willies in the current financial markets may be because she’d sold on our budget overrun to a clutch of world banks.

I fully expect, come Monday morning, to be back to our original approach of scrabbling around at the back of the virtual sofa and demanding money with menaces from other project teams. Sarah also was a key part of me retaining my – admittedly – loose grasp on reality by dealing with our insanely complicated room booking system on my behalf, depositing industrial chunks of confectionery on my desk when crap diary management meant no lunch, and making me laugh when I felt like belting someone.

We fully expected her to grow old like the rest of us working on the project that will never end but in a frankly desperate attempt to break free, she decided to get pregnant and move to Lincolnshire.

Anyway, after a beery good bye yesterday, I though she deserved a final send off into the wilds of cabbage country from the virtual immortality of the hedgehog.

Bye Sarah, best of luck and we’re going to miss you. Oh and can you please burn all copies of the budget before you leave 🙂