July 29, 1994
Dear Everyone:
I don't know what it is about the Billing System that it always knows
when I'm not around to keep an eye on it.
A couple of years ago, I went on vacation at Christmas time and
no sooner was I out the door then Billing started acting up.
Little did it know that I would
make one last check on it, using the notebook PC from home.
I ended up talking via computer
to the programmer right up until it was time to leave for the airport.
The latest snafu started last month, when I was stuck in San Francisco,
too busy with training and conversion for
Versatile
to do more than call “Livermore” and ask them if the Billing report had
arrived. They said it had.
They were wrong.
Not their fault, of course, since
they didn't really know what the report was supposed to look like.
What happened was this: Billing
snuck a peek at my schedule, saw that I would be busy right at the most
critical part of the Billing Cycle, and yelled, "Cowabunga!
She's busy!
It's
Miller Time!" It's not like
someone threw a monkey wrench into the works.
More like the whole monkey.
The upshot of this is that the programmer, “Frances”, and I have been
spending great gobs of time trying to straighten out the mess that the
Billing gremlins left
after their party. Of course,
“Frances” is not supposed to be working on Billing; she is supposed to
be assigned to another project. And
I'm supposed to be working on
Versatile; but the billing can't wait since dozens of accounting
people are affected by it.
One more thing to get in the way of testing
Versatile.
In theory, the whole team was supposed to be spending the last three
weeks testing various scenarios in
Versatile. In practice, I,
for one, haven't spent more than a few hours on it.
Something always gets in the way.
If not Billing, someone's PC
starts acting up. Or it’s
meetings.
On Wednesday, I had two meetings: One,
in San Francisco, from 8:30 to 10 0:30. The
second, in “Livermore”, across the Bay, from 1:00 to 3:00.
You wouldn't think there would be
a problem. Take
BART into the City for the morning
meeting, then BART back to the
East Bay in plenty of time to drive down to “Livermore” for the
afternoon meeting.
Except that the morning meeting kind of stretched a bit and didn't break
up until 11:35. And BART only
runs every 20 minutes at that time of day.
So I caught the 11:52 which put
me in “Moraga” at 12:29, leaving me 31 minutes to make it to
“Livermore”, which is XX miles away. You
know you're in too much of a hurry when you realize that you just
shifted into 4th gear…and you're still inside the parking
garage. I was a tad late for the
mandatory "Harassment Training" meeting.
Movies…
I have found that
The Client
seems to be the best of
John Grisham's
novels, so far. So it stands to
reason that the movie, based on the
book, is
the best of his movies, so far. And
it is. Of course, casting helps.
Susan
Sarandon can act circles around
Julia Roberts.
And
Tommy Lee Jones
is no slouch, either. As for the
newcomer, the young
actor who plays the boy, the critics are raving about him.
But they do that a lot, don't they? Remember
Henry Thomas in
E. T.--The
Extra-Terrestrial? "… The best little boy performance I've ever
seen in American film."--Roger
Ebert. Seen Henry recently?
The last I saw of him, he was
playing Danceny in
Valmont,
the other version of
Dangerous
Liaisons.
Then there was the kid in
Empire of the
Sun,
Christian Bale. Anybody seen
Christian since then? Or
Edward Furlong
in
Terminator 2:
Judgment Day? The list
goes on. We’ll see if this kid
pans out any better.
Videos…
I picked
Army of
Darkness because I was in the mood for real trash.
This is one of those
sword-and-sorcerer things where all of the budget went into special
effects, in this case an army of dead warriors brought back from the
grave more or less by accident. I
chose it because the description said "…cameos include
Bridget Fonda
and the director's brother, Theodore."
I figured a director
who gives his brother a part-time job, ala
Ron Howard, can't
be all bad, (but the movie can be.) I
couldn't find Bridget, but I actually did spot the director's brother,
Theodore.
This is because, more recently,
he shortened his name to Ted. He
plays the multilingual communications officer aboard the
SeaQuest
on NBC Sunday nights.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |