Malkavian wrote:

It's a bit like expecting someone to sanely go and dig a road trench with a small flat sponge fish.

Well, let's see. Take the fish, make a curved shape out of it and toss it in a dehydrator. Then, laminate the remains and use it to make a mold in which you can cast a steel sponge fish. Use said sponge fish to dig the trench and hope the boss doesn't notice your creativity.

Okay, so it's farfetched, but I had a situation once that definitely felt like that. I was once asked to build a test system on a mainframe. Doing it by hand would have taken a month of very dull, repetitive work. So, I took some tools I had written in VBA (hey, it's what I had to work with!), and modified them to do the job. It took about four hours to run and then a little bit of manual tweaking and voila!, a new test system.

Everyone was absolutely astounded that I was finished in a day instead of a month and my boss was mightily pleased. Unfortunately, I caught hell from the lead programmer for using VBA since no one else knew it (um, this was a one-shot deal. Why would anyone else need to know it?).

To compound the problem, I sent out an e-mail saying this was the first time I had ever BUILT a test system, so would the people who use it please double-check for errors? The lead found some JCL that I hadn't converted (it took me about 30 seconds to fix, again with VBA) and ran to the boss complaining that I was sloppy in my work. The fact that I saved a month's worth of work seemed to have escaped her.

Sigh...

Cheers,
Ovid

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