The same week one of our founders was in Singapore, the other was about as far from a conference hotel as you can get in Queensland. While Javier was on the Disruptive Leaders Program, his co-founder Jayben was in Boulia — a town of a few hundred people, a long way past where the highway stops feeling like a highway — and it was the Boulia Camel Races weekend, which is why half the state seemed to be there too.
He wasn't there for us, and he wasn't there for the camels. He was there to help a friend's live-events business put on a musical performance, working as a technician for the artists — sound, stage, the gear that has to work when the crowd arrives. Not the kind of job we usually take. But it needed someone who could make technical things behave under pressure, a long way from anyone who could help. That part we know something about. (He did get to watch some of the camel racing. That part he didn't plan.)
It also turned out to matter for reasons we didn't expect.
First, the honest version of the weekend, because it's funny now.
The accommodation nearly didn't happen. When it did, the bed turned out to be a plank of wood doing an impression of a mattress — Jayben woke up with a back that had clearly lost the argument. The work ran past two in the morning; the town, sensibly, closed at five in the afternoon. Breakfast was grim and the coffee was instant, which felt like a low point right up until the whole town ran out of coffee entirely. Food was a genuine problem to solve. There was a sixty-dollar kebab that will be remembered, and not fondly. And in the middle of all this, there were camels racing.
None of it was anyone's fault. That's just Boulia in July. You're a very long way out, half the population of the state has driven in for the weekend, and the place simply wasn't built to have its coffee and its beds and its kebabs demanded all at once. You adjust, or you don't eat.
Here's the thing, though. None of that is what stuck.
The job got done. The artists got what they needed, the gear worked, the show ran, and the people who came to watch had a good night with no idea what it took to get there. That's the whole point of the role. When the technical work is done well, it's invisible — nobody in the crowd is thinking about the person who sorted the signal chain at 2am on four hours of plank-induced sleep. They're just watching the show.
That gap — between how smooth it looks from the front and what it actually took out the back — is the most familiar thing in the world to us.
Because it's the same shape as most of what we do.
There's a sign on the edge of town — Boulia's Red Stump — that warns travellers heading west into the Simpson Desert to carry ample food, water and fuel, because if you go any further out you'll come out the other side. It reads like a joke until you've spent a weekend there. Then it reads like an operating manual. Don't assume the next thing will be provided. Bring what you need to finish.
When our work does take us to a remote site — field hardware, or a distributed setup like the flood-monitoring network we built across scattered sites — the first discipline is the same one Boulia enforces by brute fact: you don't get to assume anything. Not the power, not the connectivity, not a shop down the road, not a second chance if you forgot the part. You plan for the absence of all of it, and you make the thing work anyway.
The weekend just made the lesson physical. Comfort, coffee, communications, a backup plan — out there, none of it is a given, and the work still has to land. The teams who do well in conditions like that aren't the ones who got lucky with the conditions. They're the ones who turned up expecting nothing and prepared to do the unglamorous work regardless. Same as the documentation nobody reads until they need it. Same as the handover that lets a client run the thing without us.
It looks effortless from the front. That's the job.
Jayben came home tired, sore, and slightly wary of kebabs. He also came home having proved the thing we say about ourselves is true when it's inconvenient: the value shows up in the part nobody sees, in the place nothing works, after the exciting bit is over.
We'd rather learn that in Boulia than on a client's site. Though, for the record, next time we're bringing our own coffee.
Jayben is a co-founder of Slash Tech. Slash Tech is part of Slash Group.
