April Fewl

Okay, I'm a day late; sue me.

Its a good day to stay in bed -- slight drizzle, fairly dense fog, and when I got into work email, someone had been nice enough to create a problem record for me for the system problem I had resolved yesterday. I usually think that problem records are a good idea badly executed, and this is no exception. The logic behind a problem record is that if this should happen again, we'll see what fixed it last time. It usually doesn't work that way because a) the people resolving the problem don't look at problem records (assuming they even can; I was at home, and our problem records system isn't accessible from outside the work firewall -- the systems themselves are, but the administrative record keeping system isn't. Go figure.) and b) if you were to look at the system, you'd have to make a leap of faith about what any existing records might have used to designate the problem.

Take yesterday, for example. The initial manifestation was that a piece of automation software that's supposed to start other software wasn't doing so -- it was, itself, starting and then immediately stopping without an error message of any kind. (As it turned out, there were error messages, but the operator didn't notice them; just as well, because they weren't indicative of the problem.) Would such a problem be written as 'SA Didn't Start' or 'Systems Automation Didn't Start' or 'System won't IPL successfully' or.... you get the idea.

As it happens, to my knowledge, this particular problem had never occurred on this account before, so such a search, even if flawlessly executed, would have found nothing. So, why the problem record? Its for the other reason that we do this -- so that we can demonstrate to auditors that we have a vibrant and viable problem tracking and notification system. Very key in our auditor-conscious environment.

I'll be at home for the next hour, roughly, at which time I get to go to the local dentist, whereupon he'll inform me what he thinks his share of this dental process will be. The good news is, that it probably won't be nearly as stunning as the surgeon's piece; the bad news is that this cost is in addition to what I thought I'd have to pay back when this all started. It will almost certainly be done next year, which means it'll be covered by dental insurance. And, after the expensive fiasco this year, you can believe that I'll be looking at that very, very closely!