May 9, 2001
Dear Everyone:
Let’s talk about billing. I’m not talking about getting your phone bill, or your (shudder) energy bill. I’m talking about one department billing another department for one thing or another. For example, we bill our customers for storing their boxes in the Records Centers. In fact, overall the company spends millions of dollars moving “funny money” between various departments and operating companies.
Each group pays for phone services, for the computers they use, for the office space they use, etc. But, of course, most of this money never goes outside the company. It just moves from one cost center to another. But it’s intended to keep everyone “accountable” for what they “spend” in the course of doing business.
Recently (in the past year or so) the Powers That Be decreed that all these departments and companies would all use the same accounting system. Up until that time (and continuing at present in some cases) there were multiple accounting systems, mostly “home-grown”, that were used by various groups, including us. So for the past few months, time permitting, I’ve been playing with our billing system.
Actually, I’ve been playing with a copy of our billing system. And when I say “billing system”, I really mean a database that I cooked up a while back to manipulate the data into what’s called a “feeder file” that can be passed along to the real Billing System (soon to be replaced by the New Billing System, or NBS).
So I’ve been working with this database copy to figure out how we can produce a new “feeder file” in a format compatible with NBS. By using a copy, if I make a mistake, I can just delete the whole thing and start over from scratch with a new copy. So far, this has actually happened a couple of times.
In the “old” database (we’re still using it), each feeder file required 20 queries, which built a series of tables until it had compiled the data needed. Did I mention that there are ten separate feeder files to compile? That’s a lot of queries and tables. In the “new” database, I try to figure out how to compile the data so it works (eventually) with NBS. The good news is that once I figure out how to do it with one feeder, the others follow along with just minor changes.
Nevertheless, revising dozens of queries and tables is a bit of a job. Things will be moving along nicely, then I’ll hit a snag and have to think of another way to do something. At that point, I close my eyes and listen to my waterfall for a few minutes. Otherwise my head might explode and that would be really messy.
As of this afternoon, I think I’ve worked all the bugs out. We’ll know in the morning when I attempt to “feed” the files to NBS and see if it chokes or not. The Good News is that, as a result of all this rethinking, I was able to add most of the feeders together into just four, instead of ten. Plus I got a nice piece of coding from someone that allows me to combine the four files into just two for “feeding” into NBS. We’ll see tomorrow.
In the meantime, “Jeannie” and I did get out to see a movie last weekend. The Mummy Returns. Why did the Mummy return? Because the first movie made lots of money, of course. Not as good as the first movie, but you could say that about just about all of the mummy movies that we used to watch on Saturday afternoons. This one has lots of running, lots of fighting, lots of special effects. If you’re not too picky about a plot that you can follow, this is a good way to spend an afternoon in air-conditioned dark, with popcorn.
In other news…
I actually bought something on eBay: A Dilbert Cubicle Periscope. Cost me 8 bucks, plus shipping. It arrived last Monday. It’s basically a long cardboard box, with mirrors fixed at angles at each end. It’s also made to look like the Dilbert comic strip character. As periscopes go, it’s not that great. The cheap mirrors have so much distortion in them that you don’t get a clear picture of who that is across the room. But I was able to figure out who that was walking across the room (provided their head shows above the cubicle walls) and whether or not the person I’m looking for is standing in “Jerry’s” cubicle. It will do until something better comes along.
Come to think of it, that’s what I said about my job when I took it back in 1973.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |