Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Friday night wasn't just a random badly-timed headache; I think I'm coming down with something, based on how incredibly crappy I've felt since, the slime-monster trying to sneak down from my sinuses toward my lungs, and my inability to find a comfortable temperature (too hot -- kick off a layer of covers -- too cold -- wrap blankets tighter -- too hot ... etc.). But I only registered 96°F when I stuck a thermometer in my mouth ...?

Anywho, tired of the low signal-to-whine ratio in my recent postings, I'll add a random thought about a random memory that came to mind a little while ago for no particularly discernible reason. (Oh wait, I think I remember the train of thought that led me there after all, but it's related to a conversation I had been in the middle of a few days ago and doesn't matter right now.)

When I was working full-time, it was mostly for smaller companies (the US Army being an outlier in that regard), but I did spend a bit of time in a Fortune 500 environment, when the small company I was working for (along with a bunch of other area fen) got a contract with a major corporation and I was the body put on that job.

I was thinking about that project, and realizing I perceive it a bit differently now, at the distance of some years. The way I would describe it now is:

One of the VPs had this idea for a tool that she thought would make life a little easier for her, her staff, and the other VPs and their staffs, but she was (AFAICT) the office-automation visionary of the bunch and they weren't all that convinced that it was such a hot idea. So I got brought in to invent the thing for her, along with the user manual and everything else (fortunately it was built to make use of two other tools they were already using), and the not-there-yet-but-I-can-show-you-the-sketches stages had to be good enough to convince the other VPs that it really was as clever as she thought it was and that they ought to want it too.

Thinking about the tool now, it seems that it was really the sort of thing for which one ought to just buy a site-license for an off the shelf package and configure it to get the details right ... except for one little stumbling block.

Her desire predated clean, off-the-shelf solutions by five or ten years. So she had to have someone like me come in and write it.

So, was her idea really all that and a bag of chips? Was she right to try to push it on her colleagues? When I say, "cooperative meeting-scheduling and agenda-tracking system that generates meeting handouts and form letters as needed as well as integrating itself with each user's personal scheduler/calendar software," nowadays that does sound like something you'd evaluate a bunch of stock packages for and just buy, right? Unless most of the features you needed were already built into the tools that came bundled with your operating system (or as a feature of your email and/or calendar program, that is. So enough other people think it's a good enough idea for there to be a product category for it now, right? I'd say she had a good idea.

If I remember right (and it's been long enough that my recall could be faulty), by the time I was mostly finished, the other VPs were wondering when it would be ready, not wondering whether they wanted it. But (again, IIRC) it started out as a thing they weren't sure anybody really needed.

What struck me is that if I just say, "I wrote an agenda-tracking system for a Mac environment that integrated itself with the users' calendar tools," today, I think most people's first reaction would be, "Why? You can just buy that off the shelf." What made it a reasonable project to do was that she wanted it before such things were part of the computing-environment background scenery.

In a way, noticing how much the landscape has changed since then makes me feel old. Not as much so as having friends who weren't born yet when various Significant Historical Events I remember happened, but it's still one of those net.old.fart moments. (And it just occurred to me that I probably have friends who weren't born yet when the Great Renaming -- the landmark I use for determining who gets to claim net.old.fart status and who doesn't -- happened.)

(And as an even more random aside: one of the side effects of this project was that a few years later when UM got a bunch of NeXT machines and a friend there send me a NeXTmail message, I was able to read it and reply in kind from a VT52 dumb terminal dialed into a BSD shell account. I felt oh so clever for that one.)