and things went downhill from there

A co-worker just dumped a stack of about 200 unused, virgin computer cards on my desk.  Wow, that takes me back a few years.  I haven't a clue what I will do with these - I'm sure we don't have room for a card reader in our den at home.

You learned to be careful typing on a keypunch, because a typo meant that the whole card was scrap.  You'd have to advance the card, insert a new one, copy the old card to the point where you made the mistake and then keep typing.  No backspace in those days.  We didn't have advanced editing tools like the one I use today (Notepad).

The best part about punching cards was saving up the little punch bits until you had enough to work some evil.  They did wonders when they were poured down the windshield defroster vent in a car...

I've been working on this project for the better part of a year.  Not continuously, but in fits and starts as new pieces of it fall into place.  Earlier this year it was put on permanent hold while we waited for some programming changes to go in because a couple of critical fields weren't being fed in our database.

They completed testing and rolled out those changes about two months ago, but the next stumbling block was that I needed to combine queries from two different databases, and the tool they have given me does not let me do that.  No problem, one of the programmers on staff set up some aliases and links to bring that data over in a form that I could use.  That took about a month and a half.

Unfortunately the first time I tried to use this new dataset the whole thing blew up around my ears when I ran a query.  I had a hunch that it was something to do with the way the tables were linked, and I sent off a note to the project head saying as much.  He wrote back saying that I couldn't do the query because the tables were linked table1-->table2-->tabler3-->table4, and thus my query that pulled in data from tables1 and 4 simultaneously wouldn't work.  Hope this helps.  Have a nice day.

I fired back a letter to all concerned where I was perhaps a bit more acerbic than I meant to be, stating that while it was nice to have table4 in place, I could have fetched that data myself with a separate query, and that unless the linking was fixed so that I could do simultaneous queries, I was back to square zero.  Square zero meant that we might have to consider our other options again (such as dedicated hardware).

To my surprise, the programmer called me yesterday and said, "Since you're the end user, maybe you could tell me exactly how you want these tables linked..."  I told him, and this morning he sent me an email saying, "OK, try it now."  What do you know - it works!  After nearly a year of delays I can finally get started on...

Ack!  Ten minutes later my boss called an impromptu meeting and pulled me temporarily off the project so that I can work on a more pressing one.  In short, this project is now on hold unless the stakeholders begin to scream really loud for it.