I have worked in the IT Field since 1985, one faithful day early in that year I went from bagging groceries for Safeway Stores to being a computer programmer for them. For the first few years, all I did was software development. Then, completely out of the blue, I thought my world was over, Safeway decided to 'buy' there software from a vendor. What did this mean? Was I out of a really swell job? Well, as luck would have it, software bought from Vendors isn't as cookie cutter as I had feared. There were copious number of interfaces that had to be written between the Vendor written software and the other applications that it would not be replacing.
After 13 years of working for Safeway, I met Carol, my wife, on the Internet and I moved to the Sierra foothills and went to work for Volcano Telephone. Before I started with Volcano, they were also a shop that had written all of their own operational software, but too had bought software from an outside vendor. A couple years after I joined Volcano, the decision was made to swap vendors. Well, now our main Operational software is from a company in Montana. We have been using their software for about 6 years now. All in all, it suits our needs. We went with this new vendor, who is smaller than our previous one, because we thought, since they were smaller, that they might be more responsive to our needs. To some degree, this has proven to be true. None the less, I still keep very busy with additional report development as well as additional programs which don't fit within the scope of what they want to have as their core suite of applications.
Most recently, in order to fit our needs for offering Bundled services to customers (Video, with Telephone, with Internet) we have needed a major enhancement to their software. One our production environment we are using version 5.0 of their software. I have been tasked with implementing version 6.0 of their software. It is my job to coordinate testing with users of all aspects of the new version of the software. This version is pretty much brand new for them. They have done some simple testing, but it is my testing that seems to identify all of the bugs caused by complicated 'Real' data. Sometimes I wonder if they test their programs at all. Oh, I know they do, but yesterday while I was testing, I found that the accounting transactions were out of balance by 1.4 Million dollars. And for a company that does $117,000 in revenue every month, that is a pretty bad out of balance condition. So, I document the problems as best I can and send them off to the vendor in hopes for an overnight fix. Ya, I know better than that, it will probably be a week or so before I have a 'Fixed' version in hand, and I can start my testing all over again. Yippee.
Oh, I wish I could be back writing software again. Maybe someday. Well, I better get off to work and see if I got my 'Overnight' fix.
Have a great day! - Eric -
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