Lomcevak

This morning brought a little bit of snow. Last night it was said that it was supposed to be a huge honkin’ storm but it turned out to be not much snow at all, just a dusting. Pam went outside to get the newspaper, as she usually does on Saturday morning, but came back inside empty-handed. “There’s no fuckin’ paper,” she muttered disgustedly, partially to me and partially to the Universe.

A little while later I was checking the weather maps to see what had happened to our storm and collecting the morning email. Here was something from the paper:

Good Morning from the Home News Tribune!

We’re experiencing possible delays throughout our delivery area today, December 19, 2009 due to the current weather conditions. We apologize for the inconvenience; however you can access our e-edition immediately by visiting [...]

A couple of years back the paper took the decision to outsource delivery to some faceless fulfillment company. And years earlier than that they stopped the practice of using neighborhood kids on the street. Each change has brought a corresponding drop in service levels.

Anyway, those kids earned their tips. (I wrote about newspapers and delivery gratuities last year, too.) Weather? It just didn’t matter; the newspaper was delivered and that was that. I think our parents called it “responsibility”.

Our e-edition is an exact replica of the printed version that will be delivered to you later today.

And it is, I guess, but the navigation is clunky and you can’t fold it up on the dining room table while you enjoy breakfast and coffee. Also implied is that they intend an eventual delivery, but they’re already four or five hours late.

If you like the Home News Tribune e-edition, you may subscribe by visiting [...]

Extra, or a substitute for pulp delivery? Not sure, as I write.

It happens that I just paid the bill for our subscription. Delivery performance has incremented downward and the paper itself has shrunk – actually become considerably narrower – over the past year. Yet rates had risen again. We already know they’ve outsourced delivery. Apparently they’ve also outsourced billing because my check went to a PO box in Louisville, KY. It used to go to an address down the shore.

Newspapers all over are wringing their hands over their reduced market share. The Internet is kicking their collective asses! Is it any wonder? Maybe they deserve it.

About a month and a half ago my main personal computer, an (ancient) HP zd8000 laptop, began dropping keystrokes. I traced the problem back to the battery. No longer taking a charge, the interrupts generated as the charging circuitry tried, failed and tried again were interfering with the keyboard interrupt. My typing is bad enough; I pulled the offending battery, scanned the ‘net and ordered a new battery from overstock.com based on – what else? – price.

That was September 3rd, and the replacement battery arrived some days later. Unfortunately it was the wrong one! The order showed the correct number as did the packing list, but the thing that sat on my desk clearly showed a different number. The plastic bag it came in was already open (uh oh, could mean trouble) so I took the opportunity to stick it into the laptop, thinking perhaps it was a substitute. Nope, the computer refused it.

I used the online chat on Overstock’s Web site and explained the situation. The rep thought it best to escalate to a tech person so she told me to expect their call, which came some hours later. I hadn’t expected his call so quick. The tech generated the RMA and return shipping label and said he’d overnight another replacement.

Meanwhile I did a little checking. HP has an excellent online parts lookup tool, and I used it to check the two part numbers in question. They were markedly different. I looked them both up on the Overstock site and found the descriptions to be remarkably similar. Maybe this was the problem?

As it turned out, the next few weeks proved frustrating – for both me and Overstock – as we shipped the same incorrect battery back an forth across the country three times. In the end they said that they didn’t have the correct item. They’d process my refund and I was free to keep the incorrect battery. I sent it back anyway; there’s no sense in recycling a perfectly good battery I couldn’t use.

But that’s not the end of the story. Last Friday evening I took a call from Thomas at Overstock. He explained that my case had made it up to the executive level and that they had spent some time analyzing what went wrong. There were a few things, including a mis-SKUed warehouse bin (aha!) and lapses in communication. The analysis had resulted in some process improvements and Thomas called to tell me about them. We talked for a while about things like quality and customer service. Full disclosure: Thomas offered – and I accepted – compensation for my frustration and understanding: a correct battery and some store credit. He left his email and direct phone number.

(The correct battery arrived this afternoon, shipped overnight from Overstock’s supplier. The number fits several applications; the plastic cover trim isn’t right for my particular laptop, but I have spares from previous replacements so it’s no big deal. Overstock, if you’re reading this, don’t panic – I’m good, and I appreciate all you’ve done. You might want to follow-up with the warehouse, though.)

In my experience, the larger a company becomes the less likely is becomes that a minor customer problem actually results in action. Sure, refunds and credits are common enough, but not the continuous improvement part. To do that, and more importantly, to take the additional step of reaching out to the customer after the transaction is complete is exceptional. More should follow Overstock’s example. I’ll use them again.

Six Flags, the world’s largest theme park company with 20 parks in the United States, Canada and Mexico, is bankrupt. Still, they’re moving ahead with planned expansions in Quatar and Dubai.

One of their parks is nearby and I’ve visited quite a number of times since they opened when I was a kid. It used to be a lot of fun. But when they installed the metal detectors a couple of decades or more ago I swore I wouldn’t go anymore. I haven’t quite kept to that.

By all accounts the parks are crowded to capacity. Admission, parking, food – everything - is incredibly expensive, even for Jersey. The lines are painfully long for every ride, all the time. I was there a while back and we spent a good deal of wait time trying to calculate the cost per minute of ride experience. In excruciating detail. It’s okay, we had the time and it was good mental gymnastics. (At least I developed my company’s slogan from that trip, so I suppose it wasn’t a total loss.)

Anyway, can someone please explain to me how it’s possible that a business like that can be bankrupt? I just don’t get it.

I was in an automobile dealership service department yesterday and overheard something I’ve never heard before.

A woman with a Chrysler product needing service was being turned away! Her story, following a good hour of waiting for a diagnosis, unfolded something like this. Chrysler hasn’t been paying their third-party suppliers and so some have stopped, well, supplying. Bummer, but the thing that she needed happened to be affected. There was no stock, nothing available and the prospect of an order being fulfilled was virtually nonexistent.

The service writer went on to advise her to take her plight to Corporate and appeal to them as a wronged customer on the shitty end of the stick, through no fault of her own. It was right about then that the light bulb came on over her head – this was no ordinary conversation. She needed to take notes.

The service writer was sympathetic, gave her specific people and addresses to write to, coached her on what to say, stuff like that. But that doesn’t help her ailing car very much and, after listening to her yap on her phone while she waited for that news, wasn’t what she needed in her life just then.

The other morning on the televised news I heard of (yet another) corporate muckety-muck drawing a comfortable salary (USD6M, in this case) despite their company’s recent losses (some USD40B). And it got me to thinking about terminology.

Take the term from which this entry derives its title: ‘loss’. I’m thinking that this is one of the most misused terms around – especially today, as it applies to business and economics. It seems to be deliberately chosen to create a feeling of sympathy for the ‘lossee’, and I think that the feeling is completely misplaced.

Let’s first look at a perfectly accurate usage. “Joey Psychotic lost his home and all of his possessions to fire this morning, believed to be started when his hungry cat kicked over an unattended prayer candle…” This makes sense – Mr. Psychotic had a home. But it was consumed by fire, reduced to a wet, smoking pile of rubble, crawling with investigators. Not a home by any stretch of the imagination. You feel sorry for Mr. Psychotic, and you should (even while questioning his religious rituals).

Now, how about this one: “The Acme Prayer Candle Company lost forty billion dollars over the last three quarters of this year due to slacking demand. Stockholders fear bankruptcy as…” Nope, I don’t buy it. That which you do not have cannot be lost. Acme didn’t lose anything – they never had it in the first place. See the difference?

Let’s take a stab at writing that a little more accurately: ”The Acme Prayer Candle Company failed to realize forty billion dollars in profits over the last three quarters of this year. Acme executives cite slacking demand as the cause of their failure to deliver promised value to stockholders, who fear bankruptcy as…” Acme didn’t lose, they FAILED.

Fail brings a whole different set of emotions than loss. It’s not that failure is necessarily bad, either. After all, failure can be a very powerful teacher – well, provided one can grasp its message, which isn’t a given.

I don’t feel much sympathy toward anyone that can (mis)direct their company to failure, and yet still pull down six million greenbacks. I won’t bet on their learning anything, either, unless it’s something along the lines of, “hey, look what I just got away with!”

Maybe the companies that are failing should be allowed to fail, their directors along with them. A multitude of companies, built on good ideas, managed competently, would certainly spring up in their place. I’m not denying that there would be great steaming heaps of economic pain along the way, the likes of which most alive today have never seen.

But America, still the greatest land on Earth, would emerge stronger than ever.

[This entry is lifted verbatim from a message I recently wrote in email to a good friend. We were idly discussing a bit of documentation that one of his technical writers had produced, when he commented that he created his own standards: whatever he said, so it would go. He concluded, "It's good to be the king, sort of..."]

I was lapsing into the way things used to be. Once upon a time there were Standards for everything.

Here’s a funny story. There’s no real proprietary stuff here, but it sheds a teeny tiny bit of light on the seedy underbelly of a company that would probably prefer otherwise.

Back in the 80s and before, there was a Standards Department. A handful of folks: a few writers, a few managers, a room of shelves with binders. (This was, of course, pre-LAN, pre-email, pre-all-the-stuff-we-take-for-granted-today. They walked floppies to a PC that was connected to an IBM line-printer. This was modern; not much earlier they used typewriters. The IBM ball-headed devices – were they called Quietwriters?  Selectrics - were still around.)

I hear you saying, “roomful of shelves with binders? Golly, what could they be documenting?”

Back then, every system, every subsystem, every sub-subsystem, every database, every data feed, every EVERYTHING was custom-built for a specific purpose – be it another system, a customer, whatever. This was before all the wonderful acronym-laden standards for such stuff we have today. (“I love standards – there are so many to choose from!”)

Anyway, time passes and in comes LANs and email and all kinds of magic and, one day, they went and dissolved the Standards Department. Figured that the Programmers could write their own documentation. Out went the writers, one by one. Then the managers. Their equipment was collected and taken away and their space was re-allocated. But not before I scoured their PCs for their documentation files. Thousands and thousands of Word docs. Stashed ‘em away in a big zipfile, I did.

Then there was the room full of shelves of binders. A girl I knew, a minor manager, was given the mandate to keep the lights on.

So the years passed. Major systems were rearchitected to common standards. New products were created. The outsourcing wave washed upon the tech shores. And lots of old talent – along with the knowledge of how the proprietary systems worked – was shown the door.

Along came Y2K, at first just a glimmer on the horizon. With the massive technical audit that was undertaken to prepare for that event came the realization that quite a bit of the shiny, new, “self-documented” code was critically dependent upon… wait for it… bits of old legacy stuff that nobody knew anything about anymore.

“Wait!” someone said, “We’ll call the Standards Department! All this stuff is documented!”

Uh oh.

It took a while, but eventually it was realized that the Standards Department had been decimated the better part of two decades earlier. Some hand-wringing later they discovered the roomful of shelves of binders. It had been dutifully passed along from hand to hand through several reorganizations, relocated over 2-3 facilities moves, but there they were. Unmaintained. Disorganized. Dusty. Thick, blue, three-ring binders, labeled with crusty, cryptic strings of numbers and letters – if you were lucky. Some had fallen off with age. But descend upon the room they did, borrowing one volume or another as the analysis plodded onward.

I remembered the original room, the old Standards Department, and when I heard about this I smiled. But when I heard that as often as not the borrowed volumes weren’t being returned, my smile turned into a frown. I grabbed control of the room, had it locked, began to mediate access. Soon I was doing a brisk side business as a librarian. I blew the dust off the forgotten zipfile and got the content onto the network. After all, it’s way easier to content-search a tree of files than to traipse over to some other building an spend hours with those dusty old binders. Or sign your life away to the shaved-head dweeb that made sure you brought ‘em back. Trouble is, the files and the binders ain’t exactly one and the same all the time.

And then, there’s the stuff that no one, try as they might, could find documented ANYWHERE. Several thousands of those entities were scattered across the organization. Little black boxes, you can see what goes in and comes out, but haven’t got an inkling of what goes on inside. Except when one little black box talks directly to or from another little black box, hmmm, then you don’t really know much about the interfaces either. Quite troubling.

Y2K came and went – rather uneventfully, actually. The world didn’t end. The systems actually came out the other side better than they went in. Life went on. Interest in the room and the files waned, but didn’t go away. As it turns out, Programmers, especially contractors, especially hourly contractors with lots of churn, aren’t exactly the best when it comes to documenting their work. And “self-documenting code” really isn’t, unless the reader is quite technical. The legacy stuff, well, the stuff that’s actually documented, turns out to be the best documented stuff there is. Created by people whose job it was to make it so.

Now here’s the punchline. To this very day, if you dig deep enough, through the shiny, new Web-enabled, SOAPed and serviced layers, you could very well discover dependencies upon some bit of legacy code or another that *nobody* understands, code for which there’s *no* source code, *no* documentation…

This is a good time to end the story, as we sit and sip our morning coffee, pondering the sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach of some poor sod somewhere whose unfortunate lot puts them near one of those bits of code.

Starting a new business is, among other things, an exercise in discovering exactly which licenses, permits and permissions one needs to obtain. My local municipality requires such a license. The application consists of a one-page form and payment of fifty dollars. It seemed simple enough.
(more…)