Accidental Learnings

Dotted around our workplace (and the country) are some people who've been there forever. Comparatively.

If you have a question about our laughably old computer system, these are the go-to folk.

Unfortunately, that's so well known that it becomes awkward calling them all the time. Especially when the thing they're being called about is meant to be within our area of expertise.

I may not have a lot of time in the office to spare, but I do have a lot of stubbornness. So do some of the mini-mes my team is populated with.

So when we discovered an error we didn't have a solution to this week did we call up the helpful guy who knows everything?

Did we hell.

We put needless time and effort into finding out all the various methods we can use on our system to not fix our error. We found files that didn't need to be deleted, databases that didn't need to be updated, and forlorn instructions from decades past that are so out of date even revising them would just make us feel sad and old.

After trolling through everything known to man that we could find, we called in the experts. Not the expert we were avoiding calling, but the people who used to know what they were doing back in the day and who still have the misfortune to work within shouting distance of our team.

We also called the computer system a variety of names which we felt positive would engender a much-needed result, and then called it the opposite of those for the same reason.

We, and by this time I'd given up too so it was really just my team member slogging it out alone, tried doing a slo-mo replay of the process that had resulted in the error to see if there was anything we missed.

We discovered a new way of searching through documents, some reports that will make other team's lives easier, a truckload of stuff that should probably be consigned to cyber heaven, but did we find the answer?

Of course we did. We phoned the guy we weren't going to phone and he told us.

The error took approximately seven seconds to fix in the end, so that was a day well spent.