Back in Action

I’ve finally kicked myself into gear. Mostly because I was working a seasonal job for Enstrom’s Candies and so I’m no longer working 50-60 hour weeks. Although I have this urge to hit caps-lock on since our program for customer service pretty much required it. Actually lets have a quick chat about commercial software and things I learned.

Workarounds can be fun and exciting, especially when customers are angry and impatient.
The crashing of your program is a simple reminder to clear the buffer.
Murphy will be your new best friend, even though has some Laws you will encounter.
No matter how poorly your system does something, updating it in the middle of the busy season will make it much worse.
SQL databases have a limit to what they can handle.
If soemthing in your system works well, a user will immediately screw up and blame you for it.

From all of this I came to a startling conclusion. Being that the software we use is made by a third party company, and that this company makes the program work for a large variety of companies, it follows that making your own is a much better idea. It seems like any system made by a third party that is not tailored to the user will inherently fail in some very public way. In the case I was a part of, in the middle of the Christmas buying season exactly when you make the most sales and need a reliable system. Generally a system that works 85% of the time is acceptable (this does not include good) unless of course you make 85% of your sales during that other 15% of the time. Oops…

That said, it’s not like there was a major collapse of the system that devastated yearly sales. No, volume of sales seemed to be doing great. But that is because the toffee we make is second to none and really not very pricey. So customers are willing to put up with all kinds of nonsense for the end result. However, the time wasted in workarounds, system crashes, a website that barely functions, and other time sinks, the system becomes extremely expensive. I would argue much more expensive that the cost of the development and implementation of a proprietary system that creates a company tailored work flow. Or maybe I’m just a rabid capitalist hungry for one more sale.

meh.

Along with being back in action the site theme is changing. Those few of you that visit for updates probably noticed that the pretty background changing theme I was using before is gone. I liked the theme, but it had some problems reliably loading how I wanted it to appear. And up until now this theme was rather pink and very basic. Now it has less pink! Still pretty basic, but I’m trying to find places to make changes and keep load low and compatibility high. And I only really know enough about programming to make this process do slowly. So things will change, but they may not fly.

Anyway, enjoy the satire/dark humor dialogs that will be coming more regularly.