and things went downhill from there

I stopped at a 24-hour Robins Donuts (sic) near atara's workplace. While I am not usually a fan of their coffee, I felt an especially pressing need for coffee this morning (to the extent that I walked over to Tim Hortons for a second cup after checking my e-mail and answering machine). I was also feeling a bit peckish this morning, and even though I have promised myself that I would watch my eating this year, I decided to start the day off with a Danish.

I have a preconceived notion of what constitutes a Danish, and that preconception generally consists of a round, flaky pastry with fruit filling in the centre -- a fairly small, light snack to tide you over until real food is an option; part of a well-balanced continental breakfast. What they gave me can only be described as Danezilla; it was huge. Think of a half-pound cross between a cinnamon roll and an apple fritter and you'll have some idea of what they gave me. It was big, chewy, doughy and delicious -- but not a Danish IMO.

While I was waiting for my coffee and "Danish", I happened to glance at their pizza case. It was one of the cases in this style:

... except that the pizza at this doughnut shop was far scarier than the pizza in this little picture. This is the kind of pizza that you would expect to find in Apu's store in The Simpsons. If not for the existence of food safety laws in this town, I would swear on a bible that this pizza was left over from 2006. Perhaps pizza jerky would be more apropos when discussing the substance in the pizza warmer, since all that remained were desiccated, wedge-shaped things that might once have been food.

I find it amazing how Scott Adams can still be relevant after producing this comic for as long as he has. While I was catching up on a backlog of Dilberts, I read this one and thought, "Yes! That's exactly what it's like here."

I have run into this scenario many times over the years. The situation has improved a bit in more recent times, but there is still a very strong undercurrent of what the pointy-haired boss has so succinctly voiced in this strip. "Why should I spend money out of my budget to benefit somebody else's budget?" I get frustrated with the compartmentalization that often occurs in larger companies.

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.