Y2K, and communications...
> At 01:07 AM 05/12/98 -0700, you wrote:
> > Considering I could not use a credit card to buy something in a Major
> >electronics store a few weeks back because my card expires on xx/00 ...
> >Maybe they are not whooping it up enough...
> My card expires 03/00 but I have yet to have a problem, and I use it
> constantly.
> Come on javilk, which store? :^) We live so close together I want to
> avoid it...
It was a large newly opened electronics store, a few weeks after
opening, where I was buying a 4 gig disk drive. (Where else!)
So as not to paint "our favorite electronics store" in a bad light,
several days ago, I had no trouble using that very same card in an older
store of the same "chain" for a much larger purchase. Whether it was
truly a Y2K problem, an incompetent clerk, or a system not yet shaken down
properly, I do not know. It smelled like Y2K because:
* I have seen similar problems mentioned on TV very recently
* supervisory help did not seem to make it work either
* I was told that the card was apparently bad
* several attempts seemed to be made to read the card
* no effort was made to read the card on a different machine
(implying a store wide system type of message)
* they did offer to use the old paper system
(implying a store wide system type of message)
The last point is interesting, indicating that the card was not
flagged as stolen or such, the system just refused to accept the card with
no clear reason given, suggesting that the transaction attempt never made
it out past the reader related software. The use of backup paper also
suggests this may have happened before. Supervisory staff seemed to shrug
their shoulders, as if they had seen this before. The clerk was modestly
confused, and vague about what was happening. "Would not take the card".
So I went out, got some paper money, and paid cash.
As I said, the card worked at another store in the small chain a few
weeks later, as well as in several ATM's, so it was not the card. It may
have been a shakedown problem for the store's "home made" integrated
checkout systems at a new location. (They use what they sell...)
I just hope their systems developers all came from the same
country... I don't care WHICH country, just that they could all speak
coherently in the same language! There is a lot of talk about "outsourcing"
Y2K fixes, farming them out to other nations like India, Lithuania,
Latvia, Estonia, and Russia, where there are a lot of skilled
underemployed people; or of importing help from these countries for Y2K
problems.
If you are going to use foreign nationals for systems developers,
they HAVE to have good communications fluency in the SAME language! Books
on learning English as a Second Language will tell you that conditionals
are the LAST thing a person learns to use clearly. And conditionals are
what computing is, in very large part, all about.
Having been raised amongst immigrants speaking strange languages,
(English was not my first language,) I suspect what happens is that these
people get in the habit of guessing what was meant, in part from body
language, and going for the gist of what they understood, rather than
taking the hit of admitting to themselves that they are having serious
problems understanding what is going on around them, sort of like what
happens with older people as their hearing begins to fail.
(I still remember one incident where I was buying a used car. I was
discussing mechanical problems with the owner, who spoke poor English.
Another professorial type showed up and in his deep Russian, (I presume it
was Russian,) started expounding something profound about mechanics. I
felt knew exactly what the guy was saying, but understood Not A Word! It
was all in his hand gestures. For the life of me, he could have been
describing how to clean his tobacco pipe, or telling us that the brake
lines were about to fall out if we didn't tighten them; rather than the
problems we were having with a fitting while trying to measure the
compression of the engine's cylinders! I just smiled! You get a word or
two, and you think you understand the Whole Thing! At least till the rear
axil falls off on the highway...)
This kind of communications problem was at the root of a problem on a
project where a robot arm in a wafer fab line blindly drove itself through
a stack of IC wafers easily worth several million dollars. I was called
in afterwards; but within a week, I concluded that there was nothing I
could do because I could not communicate what had to be done to the
multiple foreign nationals adequately, delivered my message to management,
and then left. It was clear to me that they just were not communicating
adequately with each other, and running off to do what they thought they
had heard needed to be done. As a result, the code had multiple partly
redundant IF-THEN-ELSE structures that, at times, got rather deep, and was
scattered across different "assignment areas". Simple rule based systems
would have been a far better choice, providing several layers of "common
sense" type redundancy -- if the specific rules fail, there are more
general rules to make sure safe actions are taken. Also, since the rules
would be centralized, they would be easier to review, Unfortunately the
programming management (also foreign,) was just too busy trying to manage,
and too dictatorial to listen to either me, or the halting attempts of
others to communicate to them. Turnover there had reached 50 percent in
six months. The division was sold about a year or so later.
So what does that diversion have to do with Y2K? It too, is about
communication! Y2K is not something that crept up on us, all the
programmers KNEW VERY WELL what they were doing. Management rejected the
communications in many cases, deferring, deferring, deferring. Now, we
are trying to communicate with the programmers who wrote the stuff by
reading the documentation and the code. (In some cases ouija boards and
the like being somewhat prone to interpretation... but then, so are the
cryptic comments, if any.)
Funny thing, on another project one of our vendors, and so all of us,
are having problems because the comments are in Swedish... (I think it was
Swedish, or some other Scandinavian country.) They'd farmed out the
project to some multi-national corporation, and the resulting software,
though it works fairly well, is full of Swedish comments -- no one
understands it! Someone didn't bother to put the right clause in the
contract... And as an indirect result, I have the day off to muse on
communications and to work on other things...
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