June 10, 1995
Dear Everyone:
Apparently, “Alice” has been too busy, or too sick and tired, to
remember to mention in her last few letters that she won some sort of
"Sales Rep of the Year" Award, complete with a nice prize.
Congratulations, “Alice”!
Spent most of this week at ITCON95, i.e., Information Technology
Conference 1995. This is the
annual computer conference that Company holds.
It lasts for three days.
Some of the sessions are quite
interesting. This year, anything
to do with the Internet
was Standing Room Only.
Others were less interesting. I
landed in something I thought
was going to be about
Electronic
Documents. Turned out to be
Electronic Data Interchange. In
other words, electronic funds transfers, direct deposits, moving money
around without having to write checks and pay for a lot of
paper-pushers. Yawn.
“Miranda” was taking notes like crazy, since the Finance people are her
customers. As for me, if they'd
put Brad Pitt up there in his underwear, I would still have fallen
asleep. (Might have had more
interesting dreams, though.)
Yesterday, “Miranda” had set up some
Versatile
Training for about a dozen people in “Pleasant Hill” and insisted that I
be there "just in case". I
figured I'd do the introductory part, then turn the rest over to
“Miranda” and “Jerry” while I did some networking with various “Pleasant
Hill” people in the morning, then head on down to “Livermore” for the
afternoon.
As “Jerry” would put it: "NOT!!!"
First, we couldn't load the Training Database on the Training PCs
because they didn't have enough space on their hard drives.
Tried several avenues, then
decided to let the trainees log directly on to the
Versatile Server and use the
live System, as long as we kept them in the Test Database.
Next, we discovered that the supervisor had decided, instead of sending
the 9-12 people that she had told “Miranda” about, she might as well
send the whole department! Double the people meant that the training
room was much too small; so we arranged to move to another room,
dragging chairs along with this, since the second room was still small,
just not as small as the first.
Then Versatile decided to have
colic, disrupting the class and sending “Livermore” into a tailspin,
since they were experiencing the same problems we were, but all the
people they would normally call (“Jerry”, “Miranda” and me) were
unavailable. About half-way
through the morning, “Miranda” said to me, "Everything that could
possibly have gone wrong
has gone wrong!"
I told her if she thought of
anything else that could go wrong, not to say it out loud, or it
would go wrong.
Needless to say, I never made it to “Livermore”.
Movie Review…
“Jeannie” thought
Casper
sounded too sappy, a term I would be more inclined to apply to
The
Bridges of Madison County. So
I went by myself. Haven't seen
such a collection of Dads, with little kids in tow, since
The Lion
King came out. And a lot
of these Dads seemed less than pleased to be attending this showing.
I think many would rather have
been home watching almost any
sporting event.
It looks like what happened here is this:
Dad takes the rug rats to see
Casper while mom goes to see
Bridges, Dad opting for what
looks like the lesser of two evils. Casper
is cute, with a number of clever cameos, but I think it's time for
Spielberg to
hang it up as far as turning TV cartoon shows into feature-length
movies. I'd hate to see him try
to turn something like
Mr. Magoo into a
Dustin Hoffman
film.
As for the little ghost who just wants to be friendly, you can wait for
it to come out on tape and you won't have to put up with all those
loud-mouthed Dads who don't know how to shut up in a theater.
Love, as always,
Pete
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