Can I Use The Company TARDIS, Then?

We’d finally managed to persuade “management” that it would be worth the time and trouble to add some rudimentary monitoring to some of our real-time applications, so as to gather information on how often certain routines run and how long they take. This is done by adding code to the processes to spit out a message at certain points and then to run another app to sweep through the file containing these messages and produce an output summary report.

As a result, in the first month after we rolled out this new bit of functionality, we were able to present our findings to the board, summarising the insight we had now received on our real-time processes.

One of the first emails we got back from “management” was along these lines:

Management: “What a brilliant idea! Can you go back and run the same program and find out what was happening last year in the same way?”

Oy, Sunshine, what aspect of “real-time” do you not understand?

Me: “No, it is unfortunately not possible to do this. As we explained, the data is gathered at run-time, and, as you recall, this monitoring was added when the latest version of the software was rolled out a month or so ago. It is not possible to gather equivalent data from a year ago because the monitoring was not available in the software at that time.”

And the reply came back:

Management: “So, why have you only just added this monitoring to the applications now? You should have put it in last year so we could compare against last year’s data.”

Because YOU — yes, YOU PERSONALLY — did not give us authorisation to work on doing exactly just that thing, claiming it would be a complete waste of time and resources.

Me: “Please refer to [email trail] and [documentation] for a history of this enhancement.”

And the reply:

Management: “I still think you ought to have been able to do this for us. While it is useful to have this information on what the systems are doing now, it would have been far more useful to be able to compare it to what it was doing last year.”

Just another happy day at the office.