I often receive email from people needing help for one Perl project or another. Usually these are things that I do not have time to help with or am not interested in. When this occurs, if it seems appropriate, I send an email to the Portland Perl Mongers mailing list and see if anyone wants to help out.
Last Wednesday, I received a cry for help from someone that I'll call "Alice". Alice had a project that was converting a flat-file database to MySQL. Curiously enough, the flat-file system didn't scale beyond 65,000 files (eek!). Alice had a Perl programmer working on the project, but the programmer backed out at the last minute and somehow Alice had my email in her list of contacts. I don't have time to help her, but I send an email to the list and quickly get a slough of email from people wanting the project. One of the email messages read as follows:
I'd highly recommend [Alice]. I've had her working on just such a project this week.
Note: The situation with Alice has been resolved to her satisfaction.
