This being a "Who, Me?", I was waiting for James to accidentally bring the bank's online systems crashing down, accidentally trash the accounts of a major customer, that sort of thing. Yet his simple modification worked just fine - and he performed testing on it as well.

What gives?

Who, me? Has turned into do the job your paid for, aka BAU.

I had thought that 8 would be the number of appendages and it broke over vm a bank holiday weekend or Christmas where some jurisdictions where still operational and doing file updates that effectively exceeded the appendage limit.

I suspect that the application worked on the assumption that in that file there couldn't be duplicate records for the day since it was overwritten each time, but now that assumption was no longer valid and the modification caused unintended consequences downstream.

Yes I know the saying about assumptions; as for myself I'd have some check in place anyway, just in case the same transaction was received twice on consecutive days...

Ever found the time and cash demanded by a vendor was vastly more than truly required by the actual change?

Yes, frequently.

When new in the current role we had one report outstanding that just didn't balance correctly, holding up sign-off for completion of the ERP implementation (I'd only come in towards the end to clear up the sh1t). Vendor suggested another day on site was needed and, "Could we bring another person along for the experience?"

After a full day's work they didn't resolve the problem* and then billed us for both people, travel, etc. In the mean time I'd completely rewritten the report in about 2 hours despite the fact I was unfamiliar with the data structures for that particular ERP system. I would have refused to pay but I suspect management approved it just to finalise the project.

*When I looked at the report it had VAT as price * 0.175 hard coded when the rate had recently dropped to 15%, and we were an exporter. The core table they were taking the data from had the correct VAT included as a field.

From a file format change fixed with 15 lines of VB to a change to an SAP interface which would stop the business operating (a previously unpopulated field now required populating with the same value as the field beside it) I was quoted 6 months to perform and implement the change.

This was a subsidiary of a huge energy company, the company I was working for had to submit these files daily to receive any revenue for the engineering jobs being performed, this was 10'000's per day.

This did involve me attending a corporate CAB meeting (a very large multi national) where I had to publicly humiliate the Lead SAP Dev Manager to get the change approved). It turned out she had never read the, very detailed change spec I had submitted and had merely declined the request on the basis that it was 'none core' and 'none urgent'.

In reality it would have lost £20 million pounds of revenue and would have resulted in the closure of the subsidiary business

When you work for customers that when roles are reversed are going to screw you, you HAVE to screw them. That's why anything I did for lawyers, for example, costed far more than it would for another customer.... they will never do anything for you without asking a lot of money. Here they even have official prices they can't go below without being kicked out from the "Order". They even obtained that price fixing is legal, poor lads and lassies...

I was implementing a new service bureau for a european bank out in Romania (worked out there for about 4 months)

Long story which I won't go into though it was internal service bureau competing against another internal service bureau but it was more dynamic to changes and would charge 10% of the cost of the other one and ran with with 15 staff total rather than a couple of hundred, I digress....

I was interrupted with what I was doing and was asked to join a conference call between them and a vendor trying to upsell something in the product as a party with no vested interest with either of them.

The vendor was saying that this new component was going to cost €100,000 and was trying to get the bank to foot the development bill even though the vendor was trying to sell it to them. I said, I could implement what the vendor was trying to sell for free with the current software and about an hour of time so didn't need it at all.

Was fun listening to the vendor get angrier and angrier as they realised their attempt to get the bank to pay for the dev (which they would then sell on to other customers) evaporate before their eyes and that the rest of the value add had evaporated with it.

Fun times!

"Ever found the time and cash demanded by a vendor was vastly more than truly required by the actual change?"

I had a client who managed to do that all on his own.

I did occasional support work for him but the vendor still required a support contract with themselves. To enforce this they had some sort of lock on the system which involved periodically running something - I'm not sure if they logged in remotely, sent him a file to run or just gave him instructions to do it himself. I kept well clear of that. What they didn't do was provide actual updates to the S/W so in that respect they weren't providing anything in particular, just occasional problem solving.

My remit had been a bit wider as general Unix and DB admin stuff. I'd very quickly come to my own view of their S/W and, in fact, one of the things I was doing was writing bits & pieces round it to do stuff the client wanted. Eventually he realised that their support contract was providing him with nothing and he worked out the coding of the lock file that had to be changed every 6 months or so, ended the contract and updated the lock himself.

I'm not an IT person but I did have to act as translator between IT people and other staff in the education sector in the same time frame as James and his bank.

A college Web site had a course listing with days/times/subjects/costs etc. The listing was produced from a spreadsheet on the shared drive via Mavis with a copy of Dreamweaver with some templates. The spreadsheet was updated by the managers for each department, and it was the Single Source of Truth for both the Web site and the printed brochure, the latter merged into a QuarkXPress template.

Time to get professional: A Web design company made a presentation to marketing manager about a database driven Web application and something was bought on a subscription basis.

Result: Mavis still produced the printed brochure from the Single Source of Truth spreadsheet, but also now had to retype the information into the poky little form on the admin page of the Web application. So we were paying monthly for a system that generated more work with the possibility of errors.

These days: most have got back to something sane (a Single Source of Truth, but these days coming from a business planning application - another source of pain).