January 21, 1999
Dear Everyone:
Can things in Washington possibly get any sillier?
Or is this just the first harbinger of the kind of nonsense that
starts up anytime you get close to a
millennium?
Imagine dragging poor, old
Rosa Parks up to
Washington for
Clinton’s
State of the (dis)Union address, just so the right side would
have something to applaud at least once.
When are the
Republicans going to get it through their heads that
this is not Watergate?
Oh, well.
Meanwhile, back at the office.
I’m still slogging through
Records Management
software products. I’ve
viewed two of the
tapes at least three times each.
(These are the frontrunners.)
I’d recommend them for insomnia, except they’d probably give you
nightmares once they put you to sleep.
However, each time I watch the demonstrations
(again!), I notice things that I hadn’t caught the previous time.
It’s sort of like reading between the lines.
I’m starting to pick up on catch phrases like “in the underlying
database”. Translation:
Our product doesn’t really do that, you have to go to the backend
database software and make the changes there.
In other words, it’s not as easy as we’re making it look.
During this last pass through the tapes, I’ve been
assigning weighted values to how well each product does any one of 104
separate criteria. This
doesn’t sound nearly as boring as it actually is.
Plus, it’s purely subjective.
Whether a product gets a high (5), medium (3) or low (1) rating
is based largely on how well I happen to like the way it does something.
On the other hand, who (out of 30,000+ Compoids) is
better equipped to make that decision than I?
Over 25 years of experience in Records Management ought to count
for something. And besides,
no one else wants the responsibility.
So I’ve been weighting criteria and yesterday I
added up all the weights and guess what?
The product I like the best got the highest weight.
Who’d have imagined that?
Well, except for the costs, which I have only done a rough pass
through on so far. But my
pick also looks like the cheaper of the two.
So now I just need to get a “second opinion” from
my boss and then do a write-up for the Manager to approve.
Then the real fun begins.
Weeks of conferring and data-mapping and “where the heck are we
going to put this piece of information?”
Then the actual conversion.
Remember how much fun that was back in
1994?
Can’t hardly wait.
No movies this week as “Jeannie” and I were both
too busy with other things.
For comedy, just read the front page of your morning paper.
For tragedy, ditto.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |