The day SAP found me

2003. Delhi. I am 22 and I have never been on a plane.

I am, technically, an ABAP consultant at a global IT services firm. I have been one for roughly seven months. ABAP is SAP's ancient programming language — German engineers, COBOL bones, brutal verbs. Most days I sit in a fluorescent-lit office in South Delhi writing reports that pull material movement data and email it to a man in Frankfurt I have never met.

On a Tuesday afternoon someone calls me into a glass-walled meeting room. There are three people in the room. One of them is American. Two are wearing what I will later realise are travel suits.

Bangkok. Three weeks. Visa is being arranged. You leave Sunday.

I nod. I don't know what the client does. (It makes cement. It is one of the largest cement companies in the world.) I don't know where in Bangkok I'll be. I don't know what they want me to do. I am 22.

'You'll lead the portal team.'

I am extremely sure I do not know what a portal is. I will become extremely sure I do, in three weeks.

The flight is the first time I see clouds from above. I sit by the window. I do not eat the meal because I do not know what is in it. The man next to me drinks four whiskies and tells me about his daughter's wedding. I land at Suvarnabhumi at 8am and the air outside is exactly the temperature of a kitchen.

The portal team, on closer inspection, is two people. They have been waiting for someone to arrive and tell them what to do. I am their someone. They are kind about this.

For the next six months I write SAP Enterprise Portal code, hold meetings in English with people whose first language is Thai while my first language is Hindi, and learn to eat papaya salad without flinching. I make every mistake a 22-year-old can make. I am gently corrected by people more senior than me, more often than I deserve.

I come back to Delhi in the spring of 2004 running the team. Or, more truthfully, the team has decided to let me run it.

The thing about SAP

SAP, which I didn't know in 2003 and have not been able to unknow since, is the largest, most boring, most consequential piece of software in the world. Everything you've ever owned has, at some point, been on someone's SAP screen. The factories that made your phone, the trucks that moved it, the warehouses that held it, the till that rang it up — all SAP, somewhere along the line.

For someone who got into computing because of a piano-keys magazine listing, accidentally landing inside the operating system of global commerce was, retrospectively, fortunate. I just had no idea at the time.

By 2007 I was in London. I told myself it was for 18 months.

You know how that one ends.