There and back again

cog on 2004-12-01T21:21:55

There were a couple of times during the meeting when things didn't look too well...

One of those times, the two guys I was talking to suddenly wore their serious faces and one of them said: "That is not what had been agreed..."

Well... I have no idea whatsoever of what they had agreed on and with whom, but it surely wasn't me... :-|

I managed to calm them down by using the application in front of them, after which they started saying it wasn't that dificult to operate with it anyway (the problem is that you insert rules in SLQ, and the first rule I showed was a bit tricky).

The worst part was this one:

I say "We have a problem with documentation. I need to know what each field of your input represents. I'm having trouble doing anything at all without further knowledge."

The guy grabs some sheets of paper he had and, waving them, says "What about this document? Isn't it enough? Look, it contains all the information about the fields [it did]. Doesn't this satisfy your needs? Don't you have this document?"

The person with me said "Yes, we have that document"

...

WELL IT'S THE FIRST TIME I SEE THE FUCKING THING!!!!

No, I didn't say that, but I thought it.

So now I was thinking what I should say... Yes or No? If I say I have it and it's sufficient, then why would I have said I was in need of documentation? If I say I don't have it, then there's obviously a lack of communication on our side (there is, but I didn't want them to know that). If I say I have it but it doesn't satisfy my needs, he's going to ask me why...

For 25 points, guess!! What did I do? :-)

SLQ? Do you mean SQL?

ambs on 2004-12-01T21:31:25

But.. of course you did you never saw that papers. You could have seen a *copy* of them.

My guesses..

Beatnik on 2004-12-01T22:49:13

either you calmed them down by showing them the application in front of them... or you showed them a picture of your pretty girlfriend... OR.. you told them you would be wearing fishnet T-shirt next summer.

Re:My guesses..

cog on 2004-12-01T22:57:49
calmed them down by showing them the application in front of them
No, that wasn't it.
showed them a picture of your pretty girlfriend
Now that I think about it... I don't have a picture of my pretty girlfriend... and it's about a year we're together now... :-|
told them you would be wearing fishnet T-shirt next summer.
Now *that* would have never crossed my mind :-)

And then...

dws on 2004-12-02T05:52:22

At about this point, you turn to the person you're with and say "I'd like to have a bried word with you in the nearest dark alley."

What I did

cog on 2004-12-03T17:21:53

I tried reading the document upside down, realized that field 19 was marked with possible values being between 1 and 7, remembered I had seen null values for that field and said: "What about this field, for instance? You say here it's 1 to 7, but I get null values in it! Is that a bug in the system or a glitch in the documentation?"

They stuttered a bit :-) Hurray :-) Another tight situation I managed to get off of :-)

Re:What I did

cog on 2004-12-03T17:27:13
Oh, and they said they would contact some other department to find that out.