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Broken Clients
Jun. 13th, 2006 10:40 pmHey, two consecutive working days where I discovered nothing broken!
Today, however, was day three.
Broken item of the day: It's too embarrassing to describe. It looks like something has not been working since it was created over ten years ago, and people have been doing overrides on every single affected student instead of calling us and saying something was wrong.
I wrote the programmers asking them to confirm whether this was really wrong. I got the same answer I've always been getting lately: no answer at all.
The good news is that I figured out how to make it work, now that I know what it's actually doing, without any programmer having to fix anything, which is good because I don't think this thing would be easy to fix.
The bad news is that it's not only the software that's broken, but also some of my clients. I'm always telling them to call me if something doesn't make sense. Begging, really. "You may bang your head against the wall about a problem for no more than 20 minutes before calling me." That's my rule.
I'm starting to suspect that most of them don't want to call me anytime something doesn't make sense because nothing really makes any sense and they don't have the time or inclination to deal with it. I've got a few power users, and if they're not using part of the system, then we won't hear a thing about that part. I don't know what to do about that.
Sometimes people would rather have a hundred quick fixes than a real fix, so long as it's always a choice between a quick fix now or a real fix now. Actually, most of us are probably like that about some issues. Filling the emptiness in my stomach comes to mind. Putting books neatly on the shelf, because there's still room, rather than evaluating whether I actually need them also comes to mind. I probably have all kinds of issues like this. Must not lose all respect for clients.
Today, however, was day three.
Broken item of the day: It's too embarrassing to describe. It looks like something has not been working since it was created over ten years ago, and people have been doing overrides on every single affected student instead of calling us and saying something was wrong.
I wrote the programmers asking them to confirm whether this was really wrong. I got the same answer I've always been getting lately: no answer at all.
The good news is that I figured out how to make it work, now that I know what it's actually doing, without any programmer having to fix anything, which is good because I don't think this thing would be easy to fix.
The bad news is that it's not only the software that's broken, but also some of my clients. I'm always telling them to call me if something doesn't make sense. Begging, really. "You may bang your head against the wall about a problem for no more than 20 minutes before calling me." That's my rule.
I'm starting to suspect that most of them don't want to call me anytime something doesn't make sense because nothing really makes any sense and they don't have the time or inclination to deal with it. I've got a few power users, and if they're not using part of the system, then we won't hear a thing about that part. I don't know what to do about that.
Sometimes people would rather have a hundred quick fixes than a real fix, so long as it's always a choice between a quick fix now or a real fix now. Actually, most of us are probably like that about some issues. Filling the emptiness in my stomach comes to mind. Putting books neatly on the shelf, because there's still room, rather than evaluating whether I actually need them also comes to mind. I probably have all kinds of issues like this. Must not lose all respect for clients.