Gonno!!!

Heard this really interesting story from Shtew today about his friend's startup company. Apparently his friend had pooled in all his goddam savings from his Amish linage to setup a small scale software firm. He hired a lot of sales personnel along with a few Gulti software programers. These sales guys were packed off to various parts of the country to coax dumb rednecks to buy gulti created softwares (whoever said u cant sell ice to eskimos?)

Now these guys were out all the time and hence a secure system needed to be in place for them to check their emails and stuff. So Shtew's friend hired a consultant to build a fool-proof secure system with 'VPN' (lemme not go into the technical mumbo-jumbo). A regular backup schedule was setup so that it would run everynight at 3:00 in the morning.So things were going along very smoothly...smooth sailing on placid waters.

And then one fine Autumn morning...Shark attack(The server crashed)!!!! They didnt panic as they had a fine backup system configured...but alas! When the slid the backup tape into the tape drive....nothing. Tape after tape after tape yielded the same result. They panicked and called the consultant. After a few hours of fiddling around he figured out that one sales person was always logged on right from the time the system was setup. The backup was configured in such a way that it wudnt take place if someone was logged on because that would mean that the files that the person would be working on at that point in time couldnt be backed up...and hence the process would fail.

So all was a mess...a small inconsequential check box caused the doom of a budding company. The were back to square one and had to build their entire business from paper frills/printouts/memos etc... 2 yrs paper work needed to be keyed in!!!!! As for the consultant...he wud probably have filed for bankruptcy and the employee well he must be on the lookout for heading another Library Computing Services :-)

-Balls