Oh, their blandness

"They also serve who only stand and wait," said the poet. "Not so," said the hotel-keepers, who were actually accountants who had bought successful hospitality businesses. And they did away with staff until the few who remained were in a state of constant movement, and the customers were doing all the standing and waiting.  And the accountants looked and saw that it was good.

Now, people who are standing and waiting could be doing something productive, such as building loyalty, selling additional services or anticipating trouble.  But those activities went out of the window when the staff went out of the door.  So the accountants looked again, and they saw that it was not so good.  And they said, "We need better marketing!"  Because obviously the problem couldn't be the accountants' fault.  They paid no attention to the other poet, who had talked about knowing "the price of everything and the value of nothing".

So wherever you go in the world you will find hotels that are heavily advertised, usually emphasising their low prices. These are the ones I avoid.

And I'm not alone.  After all, the principal reason why I don't like standing and waiting is that I'm not very good at it.  I'll gladly pay someone to do it for me.  You'd think there would be someone to notice.

Germany annihilated!

Virtually...

Cast your mind back to the turn of the millennium: not Domes or Rivers Of Fire, but Dotcoms.  This was when networks were beginning to be intelligent, but phones were not yet smart, in fact they were super-dumb: if you had a mobile, you could send a text message to someone on the same network.  That was all.  But you probably didn’t have a mobile, because they were expensive to buy and even more expensive to run, and batteries were big and heavy and surprisingly short-lived, like pandas.

The Doorbell Tester was working for a cowboy outfit whose primary business was building high-speed phone networks in Europe and across the Atlantic.  Between testing fixes for the Millennium Bug, he was asked to help out with an application that would let landline customers dial a single national number to connect them to a local branch.  (The example the analysts always used was “1-800-PIZZAS”, which tells you (a) that the cowboys were American and (b) what market they thought they were in.  In fact, as they found out a year or so later, they were in the pouring-dollars-down-holes-in-the-ground market; and when they went bust, they blamed the banks, for lending them the money to do it.  This is absolutely true.)

The “intelligent” part of the application was the way in which it determined the customer’s location, its first act being to look at his area code.  Of course, everyone knows about American area codes: 212 is New York City, 615 is Tennessee, 555 is nowhere but is always used by film and TV when a phone number has to be shown.  Every country, the developers assumed, has a similar list, finite and comparatively stable, and usually shown at the front of the local phone book.  It became the DT’s task, because nobody else had done it, to find those lists and load them into the application database.

It was easier said than done.  There was an Internet, but no Wikipedia; information that might conceivably have any financial value was often available only on a need-to-know basis.  National telephone operators certainly didn’t publish area code lists electronically.  For the UK code list, the DT considered the options of OCR-reading or typing every entry from the hard-copy directory, but eventually borrowed the CD version (expensive, issued quarterly) of said directory from the Switchboard.  For France, he found a bureaucrat’s dream of a website that explained the Departement structure in more detail than anyone could want, and included the list he required.  And for Germany he found a University site that had two web pages with all the area codes: one in alphabetic and the other in numerical order, which saved him the task of sorting them.  Gold-dust.

All went well until User Acceptance Testing, when one of the DT’s colleagues went on a week's joyride round the scruffy ends of several European cities to demonstrate the wonders of being able to order a pizza without having to remember a six- or seven-digit number.  (You would have difficulty not remembering the national ten- or eleven-digit number, the theory went, because it would be heavily advertised.  And it would have to be heavily advertised because the concept of substituting numbers for letters, so common in North America, had never taken off elsewhere.  The ideal customer would be one who, on being kidnapped, transported to a different city, overcoming his captors and hiding in an unoccupied garage, decides to order a pizza before yelling for help.  This happens all the time in America.)

She called him from Hamburg.  “Why can’t we find Dortmund?”

Drat.  It had been the DT’s fear all along that information of uncertain provenance on the web might be unreliable.  He checked the database for the Dortmund code she gave him, and found that, no, it wasn’t there.  Oh well, he thought, this is what UAT is for.  He added Dortmund and its code to the database by hand.  Were any other codes missing, or (holding his breath) wrong?  No, she said, not yet, and they’d done quite a few.  Well, he said, keep looking, and let’s hope there are no more. 

Five minutes later, the phone rang again.  “Dusseldorf.”

Double drat: a pattern.  The DT’s heart sank as he opened the alphabetic list of codes from the German university, and bottomed out as he saw that it went from Cuxhaven to Ebeleben without passing Do(rtmund) and without collecting (nearly) two hundred other Ds.  There was nothing for it but get his colleague to smile sweetly, explain that the test database had been inadvertently loaded with the wrong file, and edge around to inquiring where her German hosts would find the most complete information if they had to. 

She came back to the office laden with biscuits, chocolate, promotional fluffy pen-tops and a CD containing what the Germans assured her was the up-to-date list of area codes.  The DT compared their list with the University’s and confirmed that it was almost 100% accurate, except for the complete absence of anywhere beginning with D.  To this day he puzzles occasionally on why a university, or anyone, would keep a list of anything that omitted just one initial letter.  What use would it be? 

I tell him it’s a homage to James Thurber.

Is Anyone Home?

Let me tell you about my friend the Doorbell Tester.  That’s not his job, it’s just what we call him.  Here’s why.

He used to work in a test lab, for a big company that made electronica (they don’t exist any longer, by the way.  Part of this story might have some bearing on why).  One of his jobs was to run standard test plans on a set of self-diagnosing circuit boards: if some component on the board failed, the board should send a signal to say that something was wrong.  About thirty types of board were used in a range of network devices, and the tests had to be run every time a change was made to the high-level software that ran the network – which happened more often than you might expect, with high-profile projects and press launches.  Ultimately, the whole network depended on these boards.  The boards themselves never changed, and neither did the low-level software that ran them.

After a couple of cycles of testing, my friend came to think that the plans were over-engineered.  It was all very well to test that, if component A was disabled, the board would say so; and that if components A and B were disabled at the same time, the board would notice both, and send alarms about both, and not go into any of the several failure scenarios the test author could imagine - such as do nothing, stop after first signal, send same signal repeatedly, or the catch-all Other Unexpected Results.  The problem was that the author had tried to cover all possible conditions.  One typical test was intended to verify that if component A was disabled, the board would not also send an alarm about component B: which may be a valid test, or not, depending on how the low-level software is written that runs the board.  If it’s not a valid test, running it is an overhead, which might be acceptable for a board having only two components A and B.  But there were about thirty boards, each with between twenty and a hundred components, and the test author expected every combination of failures to be tested: A and B, A and C, A and B and C, A and X, A and B and…  The concept of a “job for life” was not yet dead.  This was a job for Methuselah and his children, and their children's children.

So my friend tried to find out exactly how the low-level board software worked: but being the company it was, nobody could (or would) tell him.  However, he did learn the very interesting fact that the five or six boards he was testing had been around for a long time.  Indeed, as far as anyone knew, they were obsolete.  The only examples still in use anywhere were the ones in his test lab.

Yes, yes, you say, but what about doorbells?  While he was still getting to grips with understanding the test plans, my friend and I went to a party; and when someone asked him what he did, he made the mistake of trying to explain his job and his current problem.  He soon realised that even the abbreviated outline I’ve just given was too complex for a noisy alcoholic environment, and resorted to analogy.  “It’s like testing a doorbell: does it ring if the batteries are OK?  Does it not ring if they are not OK?  Does it ring if there’s nobody in?  Does it ring if there’s nobody in and a window’s open?  And so on.”  Although I’m not sure that whoever had asked was still there to hear “and so on”.

A glass or two later, in a different room, someone asked me the same question.  In that situation I never tell the truth: a woolly “import and export” is usually enough to discourage further enquiry.  On this occasion my companion of the moment didn’t bother with the usual glazed nod, but delivered a knockout punchline: “Well, there’s a bloke over there who tests doorbells for a living!”

So we don’t let him forget it.  He works for me now: about once a year, some wag (such as me) leaves a sticky note on his screen: “While you were out – nobody called.”  And screwed to his desk is a doorbell, in which there are no batteries.  It will ring, one day.  Depend on it.

First post

It's not easy to find out, when starting a blog, whether a post can be deleted to save later embarrassment.  Years ago, for some purpose now forgotten, I had to create a directory (or "folder", young people) on my then-employer's network to hold imported files.  In a sweat-inducing feat of imagination, I chose to call the folder IMPORT.  I created it, told people where to send their files to, and went home. 

Next day I started to get calls and messages of concern: the export script was failing, the files were not being transmitted, the imported files could not be processed.  As usual, it took some time to figure out from all the misinformation what was really wrong, which was that the directory IMPORT didn't exist where it should.  Then it took more time to find out why.  Had it been deleted?  Had the system been restored to an earlier state, perhaps by being backed up in the wrong direction?  (That had happened before.)  Had I created it on the wrong node?  No, I'd simply created it with the wrong name: INPORT.

It should be simple to rename a directory, I thought, especially one that I myself had created, and was empty.  I couldn't do it.  I had the privilege to create, sure, and to populate (and de-populate), but not to delete, nor even to rename.  I went quite a way up the Operations Support hierarchy looking for someone who could give me that privilege, even temporarily, or just do the job for me.  I met only puzzlement, and was offered heavily bureaucratic solutions - "You could raise a Small Project".  Apparently I was the first person ever to request such a thing.

The pragmatic solution, of course, was to confess my mistake and divert the blame.  I modified and reissued my file-transfer instructions, with a profuse apology for not noticing in my previous message that the proper name of the destination directory, INPORT, had been "corrected" by a new spell-checker.  When anyone queried why the directory was called INPORT, I blamed "technical reasons": IMPORT was a Reserved Word in some dialect of our code, so could not be used.  As the system worked perfectly well in every other way, I got away with it.

So, to sum up: anything that looks wrong with this or later posts is actually right, and any perceived fault is not in it or in your stars but in yourself, or failing that, for technical reasons.  Unless I agree, in which case, I have discovered, I can delete it. 

Don't let people tell you there's no such thing as progress.