plonq | Perhaps you haven't thought this through...

Background:

A few years back I set up some scheduled reports in our legacy system to send traffic advice notices to a Chicago ports authority. Since Chicago is a major hub, with a lot of traffic coming through it from all directions, they used this data to help coordinate movements between the various carries operating in the city limits. In the past couple of years we've upgraded our systems and switched everything over to a fancy new inventory and reporting system. The information that was once available in legacy is now stored in subject area databases. It's all there if you know how to get at it (I do). For the most part it is much better, but we lost a couple of features that we had in the creaky old legacy tools.

In short, we can no longer automatically fax or email out the results of a query. We can automatically post it to an Intranet web portal, but that doesn't do us a lot of good when it's an external customer who needs the data. I could easily recreate - and even improve on - the old suite of reports that I made, but I could not send the data anywhere useful, and it is no longer my job to produce that kind of report. It's not that I don't want to produce the reports - I would be the logical person to do it, given that I know the requirements - but I've been firmly told that my responsibilities lie elsewhere these days.

In any event, the report has not run in almost two years because legacy no longer has the data.

Fast-forward a bit:

It has been nearly two years since we sent out the last good report to the ports authority. In that time there has been a lot of finger-pointing and hand-wringing, but not a lot of movement. The department that was supposed to produce a replacement report has managed to use every legitimate tactic within their power to get the project back-burnered and delayed with (what I assume is) the desire that the project would ultimately get shelved if they delayed it long enough. "Come on, you haven't had those figures in over two years. Obviously they weren't that important if you've got by without them, right?"

With the recent departure of that department's head, the people who wanted this report managed to sneak it back into the active work queue (with the backing of a VP - which tends to add a bit of urgency to any task) and they are actively working on the report again. I should elaborate a bit on the word "actively", to include the fact that they've been working on it for a couple of weeks now, and they are barely finished the first (easiest) part. Urgh. Rant... must not... can't resist...

OMFG PEOPLE THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE! I COULD HAVE THIS ENTIRE SUITE IN THE CAN AND DEPLOYED INSIDE HALF A DAY!

(But that's no longer my job)

Present Day:

I have been in fairly frequent contact with the developer, helping him as much as I can in my current capacity. I have sent him the legacy source, and explained to him how the legacy reports got their data. I've explained what the data is for, and helped him to validate the numbers he is getting from the first half of the report set. Yesterday afternoon he emailed me and asked for a copy of the legacy data so that he could double-check a few things. I sent him a copy of the report (circa 2001). I assumed that he wanted to double-check the data requirements and layout.

I was wrong.

This morning I received a follow-up email from his manager (copied verbatim below, with only the name changed):

"Hi

plonq, Do you have a recent detail statement, e.g. by Car Number. I am trying to verify our logic and we are just not coming up with the same number of cars. Thanks. M."

<.<
>.>

NO WAI!

Is she asking what I think she's asking? At first I thought she was asking me to pull recent numbers out of a legacy system that no longer exists so that they could validate their own results. I was halfway to penning a reply along the lines if, "Dear M. Apparently you are not entirely clear on the reason why you are writing this present suite of reports..."

Then I had a striking realization.

Fucking brilliant! With our legacy systems no longer producing these numbers, my only option to produce a recent detail statement would be to write my own version of the job they are creating to run against the Oracle data. The next bit of correspondence would look like this:

"Hi

plonq, Thank you for the details. But we are puzzled at how you arrived at these figures because ours are very different. Could you please forward your source code so that we can determine the cause for such a large variance?"

Then, a week or so later, I would suddenly see my numbers appearing in a new suite of reports that they'd produced. And they'd all be getting pats on the head and accolades for producing such timely and accurate results. I'm on to them now. Oh yes.

By the way, I now have one of these:

I'll do my best not to burn down the building.