Here at Golf Masters Tour HQ we treat our computers like cherished members of the family. We eat with them, sleep with them and play those awful games that come free with Windows 95 on them. We never ever leave them alone for fear that something dreadful might come to pass and you, our dear managers, might decide to pick up the phone and inquire of us: "Whatever became of that golf competition that just seemed to disappear a few weeks before it was scheduled to end?"
Alas not everyone can devote their lives keeping tabs to the world's greatest golf competition (this is getting just a little over the top - Ed) and that, in a nutshell, is when things tend to go wrong.
Take Robert Synott, a Dublin-based manager of, well er, more than one team who put together a spreadsheet in order to keep track of how his various outfits were progressing.
This he patiently updated each week on his laptop computer and, though the best he ever did was second on the weekly leader board, he was, he reckoned gradually acquiring the expertise required to make a major assault on our overall prize.
"I felt that even if I wasn't doing terribly well at the moment then at least if I had all of the players in my computer and I could study how they had done I would be a step ahead of everyone else at the start of next year," says Synnott. Unfortunately while we stay at HQ with our computers Synnott, who works with Digtal in Dublin and has featured in this space before, took his around with him, until that is, one day recently when he returned to his car to find that the computer and back up disks ("I was backing up against the computer crashing rather than theft, to be honest") had been stolen.
Emotional appeals along the lines of "you can keep the computer but for Godsakes, have a heart and return the details of my Golf Masters teams" have a habit of falling on deaf ears in the jungle that is our capital and so along with our commiserations (and a 31/2 inch floppy to get him started again) we can only send him one of our coveted Golf Masters Polo shirts.
