Not. My. DOG!

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellow,

Back in the day, thirty years ago, when I was working on RX, the longest-running project in the world ever, we developed a lot of catchphrases.

There was, "Well... if we... if we gave... the profits... to the fish... PARP..."

Which was inspired by Laurel & Hardy when Stan got confused about their fishing business plan. We used that one whenever the RX project made no sense*.

And there was, "Maybe if I come around to the other side..."

This was from Gary Larson's "The Far Side". It was a cartoon about two dogs getting into a mess with a plan. We would say this to each other when the software failed and we didn't know why**.

And there was, "THIS. IS. NOT. MY. DOG!!!"

We would use this when our team was blamed for a failure by one of the two other sub-teams***. It was inspired by an episode of "The Simpsons" where Homer is getting on his high-horse about a misbehaving dog that is DEFINITELY not his... oh... wait.. it WAS his dog...

So we would use it when we were indignantly saying the problem was nothing to do with us.

I've been thinking "THIS. IS. NOT. MY. DOG!!!" all week. You see, Jacques and Nilesh are both on holiday. Between them, they designed a thing. Said thing is being tested this week to be implemented next. 

Quite why they were BOTH allowed to be on holiday this week is unexplained. When the thing fails - which it has been doing all week - it falls to The Data Guy to explain why.

And I'm like WHY me? I mean, YES it updates the database which has data in it, but that doesn't mean I know how it WORKS. That is NOT my job and this is NOT. MY. DOG!!

But. Anyroadup. Because I can be quite bossy and no b*gger else is doing it, I have taken charge. 

I mean. Someone has to do it. And every dog needs a home.

In other news, here is a very large stick insect. Don't worry. I put him outside shortly after this picture was taken. This is MY stick insect.

S. 

* It didn't. Not ever.

** Inevitably it would be because of Phil Levine or Peter Gavan. 

*** The RX Project was split into 3 teams - Batch, Migration and GUI. The three teams didn't talk to each other and did things in three completely different ways. Our software worked fine until it encountered migrated data at which point it blew up. We re-wrote it and it worked fine again until it encountered GUI data at which point it blew up in a completely different way. Because the GUI people decided their bit was the "right" bit they refused to change anything and we were left to deliver a system that only ever worked if NO-ONE USED THE GUI TO DO ANYTHING EVER.

That's seven years of project history summed up in a few sentences.