Petty Annoyances
Every day as we make our way through the world, we run into petty little quirks and oddities that we don’t understand, find incredibly irritating, but have to cooperate with anyway. We think to ourselves “whose boneheaded idea was this and why is it interrupting my life?” but the boss or someone else says you gotta take care of it, so you do and then forget about it until-or-unless the same thing happens again.
Sometimes, the petty annoyances have a good underlying cause that most of us just never have a reason to think about. Probably the best-known example of this today is the infamous Van Halen contract rider demanding that no brown M&M’s be present in the backstage area – and a large bowl of M&Ms was specifically requested, so some mope had to go through picking all the brown ones out for these self-indulgent rock star pricks.
Except that’s not the story. They put that rider in the contract as a safety check; David Lee Roth tells the story far better than I could, in his book, excerpts of which are at that Snopes link, but the long and short of it is that the band knew if they came backstage and found brown m&m’s, some jackass hadn’t read the contract and sure enough there was going to be a technical problem. Roth’s story of trashing a backstage area after finding brown m&m’s, just before performing a show in which the tech crew failed to read the tech contract carefully and destroyed a brand new $80K basketball court floor, illustrates the point beautifully…and of course as Roth points out, the media reports pinned $85K of damage on his backstage shenanigans and ignored the damage to the floor because the local crew didn’t read the paperwork.
Point is, sometimes these annoyances and inconveniences have pretty good reasons behind them. As it happens, I’m the creator of one of those petty little quirks that, by now, at least hundreds of thousands of people have had to face over the last twenty years or so, and since I’ve told the story socially a million times I thought it would be worth telling it here, completely, once and for all.
So if you’ve ever had a work laptop and been asked to photocopy the bottom of it and leave the copy on-site, here for the first time ever is the most likely explanation of why that happened, and why I’m the guy you’re pissed at about it.
Picture It. Sicily, 1923…
No, not really. Raleigh, North Carolina, 2000-2001. At this moment in time aside from some other things like being in a band and acting in pro wrestling, I was making my “day job” money as a computer geek. I had picked up a gig through a temp agency doing an IT inventory for Nortel Networks’ huge (17 buildings at that time) RTP campus. The job: me and a dozen-and-a-half other jobronies crawling around under desks with clipboards writing down asset tag numbers, passing them on to someone who would type it all in to a database.
After about a week and a half of this I said “hey, all of these things are bar-coded.” (Remember this was 2000 – QR codes and everyone having a scanner in their pocket hadn’t been invented yet. WiFi barely existed; we innovated some use of that during this process as well.) “Why do y’all have 18 people here doing all this badly and with huge probability of human error breaking your data, when you could just scan the barcode, ping it against the database, verify the information, and go?”
And with that question I cost 16 people their temp jobs 🙁 Well, not quite, but more true than I like to think. Some of the details are hazy now because my whole position and context shifted from being the one doing the inventory to being the one (* again not quite, more later) designing the tools to conduct the inventory, testing it in the field, and then launching it globally as an entirely new “Global Asset Management System” that rolled out to two dozen some-odd countries worldwide, they convened a seminar and flew people in from all over the globe for a week, put ’em up in fancy hotels, yadda yadda.
Apparently it was one hell of a question.
My brainstorm was related to some tech I had come across at semi-random a few months earlier, which was a Palm Pilot (remember those?) that had a built-in barcode scanner. Like the laser type, this is way before photo recognition in your pocket or QR codes or any of that, remember. I figured a little research to get the necessary tools in order, and it couldn’t be that tough to build a little tool (what we’d now refer to as an “app”) that did what we needed it to do.
I was right, and that’s where we get into the photocopy thing…
Problems And Solutions
By a stroke of luck, I was in the right place at the right time to have an idea like that, and Nortel, to their credit, got behind it hard immediately. After a short period basically idling and researching under the original project manager, I was partnered with two really great human beings, Mike and Jackie. (I’ve regrettably lost touch with Jackie over the years; Mike remains a highly respected friend who has often provided well-considered perspectives on issues I’ve discussed over the years, usually significantly less radical than mine but not as often as you might think if you looked at us on paper. Hi Mike!)
Basically the three of us put the whole thing together. I was in a bit of a silo; my primary responsibility started on the action side of things. So I found the tools and used them to write the programming necessary for the basic inventory functionality to be performed with the several dozen shiny new barcode scanners we had, test it from top to bottom, and hey since you’re testing it anyway you could actually do part of the inventory, etc.
Things went well; people who read my writing or listen to me talk would likely be surprised, but all that verbiage is ultimately in service of getting things down to their core points, getting to their roots. This change saved Nortel at least several hundred thousand dollars almost immediately, and in the long term the savings to them and other client companies of Computer Sciences Corp absolutely must have been, at minimum, in the range of tens of millions of dollars in wasted labor and correcting clerical errors, to say nothing of the additional value-add of a more robust, effective, efficient, and highly scalable asset management system.
Tech sidebar: For those of you keeping track at home, we were using a Palm III mod manufactured by Symbol Technologies. I used a platform called Pendragon Forms to create an app that would collect the data. Mike was instrumental in noting that these things also had wifi capability, which Nortel happened to be experimenting with in their buildings for other purposes at the time, so it became very close to a real-time auditing situation – you could literally scan the barcode, pull down the matching data from the server if it existed, created it if it didn’t, incidents logged, assets managed, data (oh GOD what a mess that data was!) normalized, etc., and do it all in a hundredth or less the time it took to do it the old-fashioned way.
I digress. Pendragon Forms -> MS Access/VBA -> SQL Server -> Oracle and back was the datapath I ended up having to construct and clean up and sort out and shoehorn, and I did it. Worked a lot of 15 hours days doing it, especially when I had to communicate by phone with Scotland or Hong Kong, but I got my part done and between me and my two amazing partners we managed to work a minor miracle and kind of invented a tiny little wheel that has since spun off and is probably still rippling and reverberating as tech advancement enables further refinement of the basic concepts.
Pretty awesome move for a mouthy longhair who didn’t want to crawl around under desks. Heinlein’s “Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail” comes to mind…
Failure, Success, and Irritation
So we get this thing set up and in prototype mode and start testing it, one little area of the local campus at a time. Processes are created, on and on. Then we start having a problem.
The problem, simply put, is that many of the IT assets we were trying to manage were either rarely or almost never on-site. Traveling salespeople and technicians, etc. Trying to catch these folks when they were in the office, had their laptop, and could stop what they were doing long enough to flip it over and let someone scan it, was almost impossible. You’d think this wasn’t a big deal, but even five percent of an asset group numbering somewhere close to a quarter-million primary assets (computers and printers) is a huge cash loss for the company if they can’t keep track of it. This was made additionally problematic by the nature of their contract with Dell, from whom they were leasing most of the machines; they had to match serial numbers/asset tags when they were sent back or they had to buy the missing box outright.
We struggled for weeks with how to handle this problem – mandatory office visits? Schedule a meeting? How do we make these people sit still long enough for us to scan those barcodes? As time went on and the data we were able to gather made the scope of the problem clear, equally clear became the need for a fast, elegant solution that was as non-disruptive as humanly possible.
Then it dawned on me that there’s absolutely nothing special about a barcode label. It doesn’t have some magic in it that makes it work; it’s just a binary code expressed in fields of black and white, readable by an optical scanner connected to a computer. I’d also learned that printing barcodes on highly reflective plastic stickers made for unreadable barcodes because the reflectivity confuses the scanner. But as long as it’s on a non-reflective (or somewhat non-reflective) surface, you can put a barcode on anything and as long as it’s formatted properly and you have the right tool, you can read it.
In other words, you don’t have to scan the actual, real, literal barcode. You can scan an *image* of the barcode, so long as that image is expressed in a medium the scanner can read.
In 2021 with tech advancements being what they are, I’d have said “just take a photo with your phone and send it to us, we can scan the code off this nice non-reflective flat-screen monitor.” Unfortunately we didn’t have any of the things in that sentence at that time! This was also in the very, very early days of the sorts of tools we have now that can just track assets all over the place with WiFi and networking tools, although they did exist they weren’t perfect by any means.
So what to do?
Here comes the longhair with his bright ideas again. These folks are dipping in to the office for a minute maybe once every couple of weeks or once a month, right? Just have them xerox the bottom of their laptop and pin the photocopy to their cube. The auditors can scan that just as easily as they can the real label.
And everyone went holy crap why didn’t we think of that, the audit gap for remote workers and their gear was closed, and they all lived happily ever after.
Well, except for me – while there was periodic talk of bringing me on full time, various Things kept happening. First, as you may infer from earlier text, Nortel outsourced their entire IT department to Computer Sciences Corporation in the middle of all of this. So Mike and Jackie were no longer Nortel employees and I was no longer a Nortel contractor; they were CSC employees and I was was Nortel subcontractor.
Then September 11th happened, and Nortel, which had already been hemorrhaging (their stock price went from $80/share, through a split, and then dropped to $2/share in the 20 months or so I was there), ultimately decided on December 7th, 2001, to lay off every single one of their twelve thousand subcontractors, including yours truly.
Fortunately my friends Mike and Jackie kept their jobs, and Mike mentioned to me several years later that the “xerox the laptop” thing had come into play at his latest assignment. I don’t remember where that was now, it was either A Large Rental Car Company or A Large Government Agency. But apparently the systems and processes we designed ended up being absorbed into the CSC ecosystem and rolled back out to all their clients, which at that point was a substantial percentage of large national and multinational corporations and government agencies.
That’s why I’m the guy you were mad at for five minutes once. Sorry about that.
And now you know…the rest of the story.
Post-publication edit: now that I think of it, we had to sync the palm pilots with desktop cradles wired to PCs. I don’t remember if we ever fully realized the wifi process; the tech may not have been there at the time, or maybe that’s what we were working on when I got laid off, I honestly don’t remember anymore.