On Dec 21, 2007, at 1:58 PM, Matthew Jarvis wrote: > The guard excorted me out of the building and back to my car and I > never > heard a word about it ever again.
Wow, Matt -- - Incredible story --- I LOL'ed, too. My story isn't anything as good, but here it is: I had a client (in another city) with a weird system. (Yes, I designed it, but from their operational spec.) The client gathered cash register receipts from retail stores all over N. America. These data comprised part of the database of the application, so every month they ran a program to flush out the old data and add in the new. Of course, it wasn't just an "append from" --- the raw data had to be massaged and coordinated with data in other tables. With the equipment of the time and the 1,000,000's of records coming in from the cash register, the process took *hours* to run. I did everything I could to tweak the program, memory allocation, and environment to make this process run as fast as possible. The program was chugging along for a couple of years -- not a peep from them. One day, I got a panic call -- it crashed. (Of course, rolling the thing back and starting over took *hours*, too.) I did what I could to diagnose it over the phone. These guys were notorious for poorly configuring work stations, so thought that was the likely cause. I got another call an hour or so later -- the IT director was on a rampage, and he wanted me there NOW. First thing the next morning I hopped on a plane, rented a car -- off to their town I went. When I got there, I was greeted by a bunch of nervous-looking people and escorted to the department and a free computer. Turns out the IT director had just had installed a brand- spankin'-new Novell server. He was as proud of it as if it was his kid who has just won a Nobel Prize. The way the server cached memory, when I closed a table it stayed in memory for many seconds. For some reason I don't remember now, that caused the whole application to crash. All I had to do was build a 10-second pause into the program (a little inkey(), anyone?), and off it went. The IT guys *begged* me not to tell him that it was his beloved new server that caused the problem. He would never have believed it, and an even-bigger storm would have been a-brewing. I billed them for 2 days of travel time at $1,000 per + expenses. Cost them about $200 per character that I typed into the program. Ken _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
