August 19, 1999
Dear Everyone:
A while ago, it was beginning to look like we
weren’t going to get that replacement for
Versatile
after all. There was a
difference of opinion about how and when Company would pay for the
product. After being burned
any number of times, the company came up with a policy of paying a small
down payment at the beginning, with the balance to be paid when we’re
sure the software will really work for us.
Software companies have a different approach:
Give us all the money up front.
And, if you don’t like it, too bad.
You opened the package.
Of course, large purchases, like this one, usually
include a limited warranty that allows you to try and get your money
back if the product really doesn’t work out.
But sometimes it takes longer than the warranty period to find
out if the product will really work in Company’s new company-wide
computer environment.
So our contract negotiator at CITC (Company
Information Technology Company) kept pushing one way, while the vendor
pushed the other way, and you-know-who caught in the middle.
But, long story short, they finally hammered out something they
could both live with; and the product arrived this week.
Just my luck that our DBA (database
administrator) is in “Hobby” this week on a business trip.
So it will be next week before we can get started and I can
finally get my hands on the software and find out what it really can do
(and cannot do).
In the meantime, it has been strangely q-u-i-e-t
the past couple of weeks.
I’m usually operating in crisis-mode, running from one critical problem
to the next. But in the past
two weeks, I’ve actually been able to work at my desk, getting some data
in Versatile cleaned up. I
even got some things cleaned off my desk which, according to the dates
on them, may have been sitting there since 1996.
Which only goes to prove that, if you ignore a
problem for long enough, sometimes it really does go away on its own.
Another thing I finally got around to doing was
going up to “Jeannie’s” place and setting her up with a database (a very
small database) in
Microsoft Access.
Right now, it only consists of a single table, some queries and
forms to make things easy for “Jeannie”, who is a tiny bit
computer-challenged. But we
have plans for expansion.
In the meantime, she can enter data about the jobs
she’s currently working on, plus all future jobs.
Simple queries will allow her to quickly find out how much money
she’s spending on things like parking, taking
BART, buying lunch for the attorney,
etc. Plus she can see which
jobs have been billed and which are still pending (as in, how much she
can expect to get in the next pay period).
All of this extra-curricular activity means that we
have fallen seriously behind in our movie attendance.
We haven’t been to a film in over a month (which explains the
withdrawal symptoms). I did
try to go and see
Inspector
Gadget one Sunday, since it was playing at the theater that’s
only a 10 minute walk away from home.
But the projector’s sound system went on the fritz; and all I got
for my trouble was two readmission tickets for the price of one.
Since “Jeannie” paid for the last movie, these will
come in handy when it’s my turn to pay, providing we go back to that
theater. Which, undoubtedly,
some day we will.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |