Keeping the Systems Going!
At lunch today I was sitting in the canteen minding my own business when one of the testers approached me, asking if I would mind if he joined me. Rather stupidly I said no, the tester took that as an invitation to start a discussion on network performance. Now just to enlighten people we have a separate networking team to manage the network, they may not be the best there are but in the main they do keep it going. We do have the odd problem, but the who doesn’t. As there are thousands of users on the network, the performance can be a bit variable and apparently it was running slowly at this point in time. Anyway as my lunch time was turning into work time, I came up with a cunning plan. In order to prevent the tester from babbling any more I told him not to worry as we had a button we could press that would make the network run at it’s optimum speed, problem solved or so I thought – the tester did stop talking about the network performance, which was the objective after all. However later in the afternoon I recieved a call from one of the networking people, asking how the systems admins could speed the network up “at the push of a button”.

Trying to explain what had happened to someone with the retention abilities of a Goldfish was some what frustrating, it would seem that the message did get through but it did take some time. Still I did get to have lunch with the minimum of disruption, a bonus if you ask me!