Emily Latella gets wired!

[gridlore]

From an unrelated thread in rec.games.frp.dnd

"A user called customer service at [company for whom I no longer work,
but they've politely asked not to be named] and was just gushing with
praise for her new computer. She was amazed at how much information was
stored on it, how she could ask it about any topic in the entire world
and it would spout forth a mountain of information in every level of
detail -- it had technical stuff, laymen stuff, humor, religion, even a
few personal things she wanted to look up. She thought it was amazing
how much information was packed into this one little program that came
free with her computer.

"That's great, ma'am. If you can tell me the name of the program, I'll
be happy to let the members of the team know that you like it."

"Internet Explorer", she said.

The CS tech explained that the information wasn't all in her computer,
but that it went out to the Internet to fetch it, at her request. Her
computer was connected to millions of other computers all over the
world...

"My computer is connected to millions of others, all over the world?"

"Yes ma'am; pretty neat, huh?"

"Oh. ...I don't like that... "

Comments

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

Scale that up by a thousand or so (in money and people) and you have the gist of a typical client-requirements conversation.

"Oh, and we'll need to store every customer contact or transaction we ever have, forever, fully cross-indexed and with all relevant documents stored in original text form, too. And we need to be able to get to any record in 3 seconds or less. And it has to be available 24/7."

"My. Okay, well, a cluster of E350s running Oracle 9i and a great big disk farm should just barely handle--"

"Oh, no, we don't want to spend a lot on the database. The CEO's nephew says he can do it in MySQL."