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A number of years ago, in my first job in IT, I worked for a local health care cooperative automating the data gathering of an outbound call center.
That sounds nice and sophisticated. What really happened was that I worked in a group with a bunch of little old ladies –meant in the dearest sense you could mean it – they were little, and old, and ladies. Imagine working with your mom or grandma to get the picture. They made calls to new members in the various regions to inform them of the possibilities they could expect with their new membership. My job was to automate the data gathering of the department. Each telephone call was logged, categorized, and eventually summarized so the region could be billed for the work done on their behalf.
How this was done was simple: Paper, pencil, and a bunch of little hash marks: IIIII IIIII IIIII. Each hash mark represented one telephone call – which could take place in seconds, or many minutes. They were valuable hash marks.
My job – summarize it so those hash marks could be turned into money at the end of the quarter.
I was given the process, and as I sat there with a solar powered calculator adding hash marks for weeks every quarter while a $2000.00 computer sitting on my desk burned electrons, I had this strange idea that “there’s GOT to be a better way than this.” This is where the automation came in. But automating it so a bunch of little old ladies could use it – correction – would use it – was key.
I’d been told that for this data gathering project, I would not be allowed to use a database, I would have to use Microsoft’s Excel. (that’s another story for another time) And so, technically, I had to make Excel look and act like a database, but more importantly, I had to get these little old ladies (who can be mighty stubborn, I might add) to go from things they could see and feel (pencil and paper) to things they couldn’t (electrons).
One of the little old ladies was named Georgiana. She had been diagnosed with ADD, and was quite aware of it, so she worked hard, with stacks of post-it notes all over to help keep herself on track. She also was an absolute delight to work with, and would tell me any time some code I wrote didn’t make sense. Conversely, if it did make sense, and she understood it, she would let me know – and then I knew everyone else would understand it as well.
So Georgiana became my canary in the coal mine. She would not only tell me when she didn’t understand how some functionality was supposed to work, she would also tell me when the others had trouble.
And as a result, that trouble, whatever it was, would get fixed. In human terms, they’d understand it better. In business terms, their productivity would go up. In human terms, they’d have less frustration. In business terms, there’d be fewer impediments to them doing their jobs.
All because the code was written with the customer in mind.
I wrote thousands of lines of code for that project. It eventually became a distributed data repository, on two separate, totally incompatible networks, that could quite literally only communicate via email, so the calculations happened via Excel formulas, daily reporting happened via distributed Excel and Outlook macros and Novell Groupwise automation, and summarization and reporting at the end of the quarter was done with Excel macros and linking and embedding the results into Word. This took the generation of the report down from weeks to two hours, which I thought was a bit of an accomplishment – but it became very clear to me that no matter how wonderful, how exciting, how shiny, sparkly or technically brilliant the code was, if I didn’t listen to my customers – if my code didn’t solve the problems they were facing on a daily basis, then they wouldn’t use it. If it didn’t do what the customer wanted, then all the effort I put into it was a complete and utter waste of time, both mine and the user’s. I’ll tell that story some other time – but over time, I realized that more and more, the code I wrote was written with one little old lady in mind.
It’s been 15 years now, but in every line of code I write now is a little bit written for Georgiana.
(c) Tom Roush 2009
Sometimes, trouble is harder to get out of than it is to get into, and sometimes, getting out of it can be a little more painful than staying out of it would have been.
Of course, I have a story about this.
It started, as these things often do, with an innocuous question from my son, who’d just come back from a class trip to France.
“Pop, is it possible for the memory of something to be better than the event itself?”
That kind of question had me listening with all ears, and brain set fully on “record”.
“Um… Yeah, why?”
“Well, when we were in Paris, – well – did you know that they sell beer in vending machines in France?”
“No, I didn’t…”
Unspoken was the fact that not only had he noticed that they sell beer in vending machines, but also noted the sounds that coins make going in, and the sounds that cans make coming out, and how cold they feel once they get into your hand..
Sometimes it’s better to just let the story tell itself, so I waited. He’d gotten a tattoo before he’d gone, a fairly sizable one. He figured he was 18 and could do that with or without my permission, so he did. He’d told the fellow who did the tattoo that he’d bring some French Cigarettes back for him, so he found some Gitaines, or Gauloises, I forget which. These are cigarettes that would make the Marlboro man look like an absolute wuss, just before he started hacking up rugged pieces of lung.
Part of the trip to France involved a stop in Paris, and the free time they had involved them walking… Everywhere. Late one evening, after one of these long days of walking, he and his roommate were standing on a balcony of their hotel room, relaxing, leaning on the railing, looking out over Paris.
In springtime.
I’ll pause here, while the image gets burned into your mind…
Understand, it’s the wrong image, but still…
So they’re standing there on the balcony, when that image tried to assert herself. I mean, there they are, overlooking one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and the image that kept calling to them had a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and was so-o-o-o cool.
The pieces were all there, all they had to do was answer the call of that oh-so-cool image.
That’s when one of them decided he wanted to try the French beer.
Just a note: two words that have never, ever gone together in the same sentence: French and Beer.
French and Wine: Totally different story.
German and Beer: Definitely a different story.
French and beer? Not a chance.
But, they were in Paris, and chances like this don’t come up very often, so they tried the French beer.
“Have you ever had French beer? It tastes like cat piss!”
This was not a comparison I felt qualified to make, nor am I sure he was, but we’ll let that one go.
After gagging and spewing a bit on the cat – er beer, they decided to try the cigarettes.
“Pop, what do they put INTO those things? I mean, it was like sucking on asphalt.
It was GROSS! “How do people smoke those things?”
Sometimes a single whiff of asphalt is more effective than the most strident parent’s words. I smiled.
“And we had to – just HAD to get that taste out of our mouths and the only thing we had was that French beer….”
Ahh…
Paris…
Springtime…
A balcony… a drink, a friend, and smoke, drifting lazily from the end of a cigarette…
That’s the memory.
The reality is a little different.
© Tom Roush 2009
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