Technical tinkerers are the worst

Taking calls for old jobs

Late last week, having left a project in which my contribution was critical, I got a call from the project manager about some issues that they had encountered and were having problems resolving.

I agreed to take calls from the technical people and see what I could do to help. When the call finally came through and I was told what they had encountered my intuition and experience just felt it was a non-problem that had been complicated by unnecessary tinkering on the one end and a basic inability to understand abstraction with technologies.

A template is a template is a template

The environment we built provides for the ability to document the settings on one environment using a portable format and wizard assisted method in an export process and the using the same wizard to import the settings into another environment.

This follows a basic template format which allows for common elements to be transferred but requires that some unique elements be edited to reflect the new environment. All those elements had been documented.

One of those elements deals with recording the status of the environment, but the references are not updated and hence technicians cannot check the state of the environment for operational effectiveness – the simple solution is to delete the foreign references and select the local references.

Tinkerers are the worst technical people

Now, I know technicians like to see what goes on under the bonnet; I have no problems with that. I like to know how a television works because I studied electronic engineering but I don’t at a whim go poking a screw-driver in the back of my television just because it is fun, I could be electrocuted, quite easily, even if I knew exactly what I was doing.

I sometimes give deference to the simple notice – No user serviceable parts – I wonder if that appears on modern equipment nowadays, I suppose the warning is more the risk of losing your warranty if you try to tinker with the innards of your equipment.

After the conversation ended, I just knew the smart guy had tinkered with the template directly and wrecked the environment and was now looking for assurances that if he continued that dastardly act the functionality of the environment could be guaranteed.

The absence of logic and reason

Since I was away from home, I could not simulate the conditions he was describing, in fact, I should have asked at the beginning what symptoms had been presented to them before the tinkering started.

The problem with many technicians and engineers today is that they lack analytical skills, they’ll rather tinker and test unsound assumptions with trial and error – they might eventually solve the problem but you can never get them to walk you through the problem discovery to problem resolution because the critical ingredient for analysis is logic and reasoning and that is usually missing.

I fear something in the educational system has deprived many technical personnel of the ability to just stand back, review the situation, work out scenarios, dry run possible resolutions and test assumptions against sound logic. They can see what but never seem to know how or why.

They have to be seen doing something and thinking is not part of doing something, it is scary, I can assure you it is – because what ends up happening is every single issue requires a complete rebuild once they hit a bottleneck - that is time and money.

Doing it right the first time

From my wealth of experience, I have rarely had to rebuild anything I have built myself because of the time taken to understand what I am doing in the first place. However, in many cases I have had to rebuild what others have done because it becomes evident that certain omissions in the construction process are critical to the operation or performance of that environment and that omission cannot be corrected in live systems.

I am sometimes left completely exasperated by the lack of meticulous application of technical expertise in some of these places, I take my time because my philosophy is what is worth doing at all is worth doing well - the first time.

Yes, he did

Anyway, I was called by the project manager again today to arrange another meeting with the technical people and somehow they had tried to call me a couple of times during the day, well, the reason why I had not gotten the call was because the tinkerer had transcribed my number wrongly.

So, we chatted and I had to get the first bit of information out of him, indeed, he had edited the template directly – I simply said, I cannot believe that you edited the XML file, anyone should know that an automatically generated file is not there for tinkering.

Basically, even if you can identify the elements that need changing, there is no telling what other related elements are linked by coded or encrypted values, but in true cowboy fashion, he had edited the file and corrupted the environment.

Now, there is no way how I could then engage in a conversation with this tinkerer on the level of an experienced and learned technician with the expertise to distinguish himself properly.

And indeed, the conversation did get to a point where he remonstrated that he had not just started working with these environments and I was getting irritated with what was turning out to be an abject waste of my time.

The impossible question

By the time we got to the end of the conversation, he wanted to know if he could trust the environment he had built, well, I trust the environment I built, I trust the use of templates to transfer settings and I trust my ability to leave black boxes alone if I decide to use wizards to perform otherwise time-consuming activities.

I could not vouch for his skills or expertise and in the end, he decided I was not helpful at all, I am glad it ended that way because I would be an idiot to vouch for the kind of stuff he had been doing.

I called the project manager and gave him a piece of my mind asking that next time I would rather converse with others with constrained cowboy tendencies whilst intimating him of the fact that my time had really been wasted almost unforgivably.

Some so-called administrators should never be let near critical infrastructure for the sanity of the bigger world.

The people are high on opium - IV

Usher in the lady engineers

And so continues my journey down the annals of the memory of Muslim encounters beyond home.

We usually do encounter ladies taking up engineering courses especially, mechanical and civil engineering which at times is considered physical and quite manly for the fairer sex.

In Nigeria where male chauvinism can be overbearing ladies might not just be the butt of nuisance and sexist jokes, but some men would scheme to cause serious embarrassment to the ladies just to make them both uncomfortable and unwanted.

As it happens, the ladies who take up engineering are usually made of sterner stuff than puny men can throw at them.

They not only excel in academic activity, but also beat the men in craft too.

Whilst I was down in the South for the entrance examinations to secondary school, the aunt who gave me lessons was a budding Electrical engineer.

Overalls without a manicure

In polytechnic, we had a lady who rolled up her sleeves in the mechanical engineering class as she would so soon be under a car, as she would have her overalls caked with precipitation of motor oils; hands that would have a manicurist hire industrial heavy duty tools, she was gutsy.

Then in my class, as I was studying Electrical engineering, there was a lady whose demeanour was such that no one called her by name.

Rather, she had the appellation Haja – inferring she had performed the Islamic pillar of visiting Mecca. What was striking beyond her manner was her mode of dress.

She was covered all over and even wore gloves, and had a scarf whose train was just probably a few inches short of Princess Diana’s wedding train.

Protocols for a handshake

That in particular had us musing to each other, quietly; the danger of the scarf getting caught in the moving parts of the lathe our curriculum including crafting bric-a-brac out of sheet steel like bottle openers.

She never shook hands with men, but I once had the honour of having my hand touched in greeting, a rarity that exuded mutual respect.

Both ladies were lovely Muslim girls, one a tomboy and the other as pious as Mother Theresa. The former mildly secular the latter rather devout and sometimes given to serious religious debate, but both utterly reasonable.

The might of the lecturer

Lecturers in higher educational institutions in Nigeria then could be quite interesting and megalomaniacal without sanction. They could as easily mark you down subjectively as they could score you well for devoting your every waking hour to excelling in their course.

To say they were prone to jealousy if they felt you were not committed to failing all else to barely passing their vocation would be an understatement.

Beyond our tuition fees, lecturers even produced cheap and poorly produced tutorials that they charged for and sometimes set their tests verbatim out of the tutorial.

Woe art thou – if your hard-earned and meagre resources did not augment the salaries of lecturers as they prey like vampire bats on their wards.

Qurani-Biblical Mentors

However, it was lecturers engaged in religious activity that exercised the worst type of abuse of power. Whilst we are used to Christian proselytising, the Islamic version was definitely a new development.

It was not more the Jihad, but a battle of the minds, the war for the will and the fear of failure; all colluding to convert you to other faiths.

Many at school sometimes suffered temporary apostasy as one who held the key of your success and failure called on your service with impunity and left you helpless that resistance meant instant failure; the reality of understanding futility in the face of lawlessness.

One such lecturer lead a Muslim group that met on Saturday evenings sharing the word of the holy book and debating with each other about the parallels with Christianity and the superiority of observed service to quiet faith.

Spiritual Islam – eyewitness account

The whole class was invited to a feast that celebrates the revelation of the Qu’ran; we all graced the occasion as we sat outside in rows listening to the preacher reveal the gems of paradise found in joining the group.

Suddenly, a young girl seemingly had seizures, convulsed and began to stutter as someone took the role of interpreting the “revelations” from god.

By the time we knew what was going on, a good few ‘virgins’ became convulsed in this mass hysteria as we all watched with incredulity.

Never had we seen people of an Islamic persuasion display the manifestation of some form of spiritual possession and activity reminiscent of the white garment traditional Nigerian churches.

Have no hand

We left soon enough as all the leaders of the meeting had to withdraw to receive and decode the message from afar – none said anything about the event – but when we next mentioned it amongst friends – we were in stitches for hours on end.

They would definitely have had our hands cut off from the wrist if we deigned to caricature the lecturer talk less of you know who.