From: VP
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 8:37 AM
To: Average Joe
FYI, regarding that upcoming project with [Company X], they are going to need not only an agent feed from us, but also a property feed including Open House information and home photographs.
From: Average Joe
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 8:38 AM
To: VP
Wait, so now we are feeding them data too? I thought we were just updating the enhanced agents...
From: VP
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 8:44 AM
To: Average Joe
Regrettably. Oh, and they are going to need an office feed as well.
From: Average Joe
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 2:19 PM
To: VP
Lovely.
From: VP
Sent: Fri 10/19/2007 8:02 AM
To: Average Joe
[Company X] has just sent me the following note:
“In your agent.txt file, you have an agent record for Renée P. It contains a Unicode character in the agent name. It is not allowed. Please replace it with a normal e. Please correct and resend.”
From: Average Joe
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 8:06 AM
To: VP
Are they for real? Are we expected to change her name for them?
1) That is how her name is spelled.
2) None of our other clients or partners has a problem with this. Not us, not any of our other feeds.
3) This would be a ROYAL pain in the ass to program to check for this.
From: VP
Sent: Fri 10/19/2007 11:07 AM
To: Average Joe
Man, I don’t know what to say. One thing I know for sure – they are technologically unyielding. From our end, how can the “accent thing” be fixed?
From: Average Joe
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 11:43 AM
To: VP
I can simply take it out of her name. But that does nothing to prevent her from putting it back in, or us hiring someone else with that mark. On their side, that should solve their problem, but honestly it's not physically correct.
In many ways it is like telling Craig over at [Company X] that we have to use a K instead of a C in Craig in his name since we can't deal with it.
Again, I can do a quick band-aide. But not only is this not a long term solution, it is wrong to do so. We'll have the same problem if we have to add Renée K. from IT, or hire someone else.
These are people's names we're talking about. And a permanent solution would be to have to come up with some code that checks for these types of chars in every single field we send them, then come up with an acceptable "alternate" character to use in its place. It's simply not viable.
(And frankly I'm getting tired of us having to do all their work for them. Can't they fix their own code to work properly?? Nobody else has this problem.)
If you need to send them an e-mail here’s an outline:
“To state the obvious - we have very proud people of various ethnicities in our organization, and bizarre spellings and accents are going to be more common in the future, not less. Are you saying that cross the entire US, [Company X] does not support any NON-English character accents? You need to fix this on your end and not have us write code that changes (not “corrects”) the way our agents spell their name.”
From: VP
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 8:44 AM
To: Average Joe
Another e-mail from them:
“Good Morning All, I hope each of you had a wonderful weekend! Good News! Matt was able to change all of the agent passwords to : XXXXXX
Please note, this password has been created for ALL existing agents, less those that are current members of [Company X]. Going forward, as a new agent is added to your roster, this password must be created by Average Joe, or other administrator within your company, as [Company X] does not have a way to automate this change.”
From: Average Joe
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 8:44 AM
To: VP
Are they now saying that we are going to have to manually add agents into [Company X] as well? That when we add a new agent to the daily feed it won't automatically update for them on their side? What are they automating for us at all??? That's ridic... nevermind.
From: VP
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 2:45 PM
To: Average Joe
Why don’t you have Susanne go in and update these as they come in?
From: Average Joe
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 2:47 PM
To: VP; Susanne
Having Susanne spend all this time updating this stuff isn't going to fix the root cause of the problem. The moment we get a new agent on a day that Susanne isn’t around then [Company X] is going to die again.
From: VP
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 2:51 PM
To: Average Joe; Susanne
Agreed. I was viewing this as just a band-aid.
From: Susanne
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2007 9:54 AM
To: VP; Average Joe
So........does this mean I should go in and clean these up??????
From: VP
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 12:13 PM
To: Average Joe
Yet another e-mail from them:
“This is the proposed agenda needed to complete the data feed by Nov 1st.
- All agent.txt errors need to be resolved. I have forwarded the list of the outstanding errors. After the file has been corrected, we will then continue with our testing. When the file is good, we will then process the agent updates to your control panels
- We will then return to QA processing and resolve any property issues. When the property file is error free, we will then process the property records in production.”
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 2:48 PM
To: VP
I have just spoken with them and have discovered yet another disturbing issue:
They are not capable of doing any error handling on their end. (????) What kind of company is this? If there is an issue with the data, their entire process blows up. We are going to have to revisit the entire idea of the feed to them.
Looking at the error list that they sent over, this is going to be a big deal because these so called errors are NOT errors on our end. The biggest issue is where an agent is listed under the wrong office in their system. This occurs because they refuse to use our office feed and instead use theirs which handles satellite offices as individual offices instead of under the umbrella of one of our local offices and managers. Since they don’t match, it crashes their entire system.
From: VP
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 9:11 AM
To: Average Joe
From an agent in the field:
“I am upset that my password has been changed for [Company X]. This was paid for by me, I had just renewed in September so I don’t get the benefit of the discount until next year. For you to change our password and everyone’s to be the same is unacceptable. Please advise.”
Why were their accounts affected?
From: Average Joe
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 10:09 AM
To: VP
Best guess? [Company X] changed 100% of our agents when they hard-coded the password switch. They didn't omit our existing customers.
From: VP
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:27 AM
To: Average Joe
As a result of the “technical challenges’ on their end, we’re going to have to cut back the items in our feed. Are you 100% confident that there is no other way to get the extra data to them in another format?
From: Average Joe
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:39 AM
To: VP
100% confident? No. But right now I can't think of any other way. It doesn't mean it's not possible, but I don't know how to do it. I’ve got open tickets at a few technical websites in hopes that maybe someone out there can offer some new insight.
From: VP
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:53 AM
To: Average Joe
It sounds like we’re going to have to stand down on this project. Like you, I hate admitting defeat…
From: Average Joe
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:54 AM
To: VP
This battle was going to take far more resources upfront for us to win.
From: VP
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:55 AM
To: Average Joe
So, I am Rumsfeld in this scenario??
From: Average Joe
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 11:10 AM
To: VP
Bush. You're the figurehead on a stick calling the shots.
3 comments:
And I thought I had it bad some days....
Oh, man, that is too damn sad. These people can actually run a company? Amazing.
You have no idea how difficult this was for me to read. It brought back SO many memories of my days in technology. I really don't regret leaving them behind.
Not one little bit.....
Gigs
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