Alice in Wonderland

This is what working with my current customer's IT department makes me feel like. Everything about it is topsy-turvy upside down like the nursery ryhme says. They have DBA's developing complex, multi-tiered .Net applications. And they have computer programmers who just give you the data - i.e. they just know databases & table names - but can't answer any questions about the logic of the application or what it means in the business sense.

Today they point me to some guy in their finance department because apparently he's the only one who knows what all the data is for. And when I spoke to him it turns out that he actually developed the entire application & the IT department are essentially just hosting it for him in their servers. So now they have finance professionals working as System Analysts AND Application developers!

This is crazy. I've never seen anything like it. You have the user's level & then the DBA's level working together to get everything done while an entire department of IT consultants & programmers get paid exoibrant fees to do essentially nothing! No wonder they're outsourcing!I don't know how they survived as long as they did!

Needless to say they have huge information security & coordination problems. Their insurance company is going crazy. They're being hounded by external auditors. And they failed to get ISO certification last year. Surprised anyone?


One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead men got up to fight,
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other,
One was blind and the other couldn't see,
So they chose a dummy for a referee.

A blind man went to see fair play,
A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"
A paralysed donkey passing by,
Kicked the blind man in the eye,
Knocked him through a nine inch wall,
Into a dry ditch and drowned them all,
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
And came to arrest the two dead boys,
If you don't believe this story’s true,
Ask the blind man he saw it too!