Opinion: Blood, sweat and custard

Posted on 6 Nov 2009 at 14:27

 

Gallery

Modern work methods have improved David Robinson's life no end, but he longs for the days when he met his custards in person and helped them air their dirty laundry.

Once upon a time, writing this column was a doddle: a quick blast on the keyboard once a month to recount the events of the past few weeks and the daft things custards had said and done. The most difficult part was deciding what to leave out. These days it can be really hard. So what's changed? I guess it's the environment we're working in - not the rooms and buildings, but the way we work. The dozy customers are certainly no less dozy than they used to be.

Back in 1986, when I started writing Under Development, the deal was that if anything went wrong with a custard's system, we'd first try talking to them on the phone to divine what the problem was (as opposed to what they said it was) by asking questions and getting them to try stuff.

A common problem, for example, would be that the screen was blank, which the user interpreted as a broken monitor. Usually all that had happened was that the office cleaner had accidentally turned down the brightness or contrast while dusting, and the images were too dark to see. So that was the first thing you'd get them to check.

Bin there, done that

If divination didn't solve the problem, the only option would be a car journey. With customers all over the country, I made a lot of car journeys and, at one point, had a large Vauxhall estate car (no laughing) that had done over 200,000 miles. Once you were at the client site, you'd interact with human beings who, due to their limited vision of how computers worked, provided loads of incidents that were worth writing about.

A classic example was the time I went to the south coast to do some system updates for a company that was developing a system for tracking and identifying stolen boats. Our contribution was a database system that recorded who owned which boat and provided a remote querying facility. The server was a Unix box capable of handling 32 simultaneous users - all from a single 486 processor.

One morning, Richard the development director needed a lift into the office (a modern two-storey glass and steel affair with a mezzanine floor), so I volunteered to pick him up from his flash 'condo'. He came out clutching two black plastic bags, one of which he chucked into a large wheely bin. "Rubbish collection day," he explained. The other went on the back seat of the Vauxhall. I asked what was in the bag and he said it was his laundry. After a couple of miles with the car heater on, it was beginning to pong a bit (actually a lot) and I said so. He turned a purple colour and had me urgently turn round and go back to the flat, because he'd binned the wrong bag. Fortunately, we got there just as the rubbish truck arrived, so his shirts were saved from the landfill site. This was the man in charge of a complex technical development.

Remote custards

Thanks to the near-universal availability of high-bandwidth internet services, almost all technical support is now done by remote access. We simply set up a VPN connection to the client server and a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) session to sort out the software or operating system. That's enough, unless the problem requires a screwdriver with engineer attached, which is rare these days as hardware is generally so reliable.

As a consequence, I spend far fewer miserable hours traipsing about the congested motorway system consuming scarce resources and reserves of good humour. That, in the main, is wonderful, but with much less face-to-face interaction with the custards, I get to know about far fewer 'black plastic bag' type events. I need some AI software to run on clients' PCs that acts as a bozo detector, logging all the mistakes and sorting them into a hierarchy of stupidity.