My MacBook is now five years old and in need of a new battery. Which meant a trip to the local Apple store for diagnostics. I’ll need to let them have the machine for several days so they can ship it off to a repair center. That will require a bit of juggling to figure out when I can be without one of my primary tools.
I do keep regular backups for this machine which reminded me of a story from my consulting days. Appropriately enough I suppose, it was the same project I wrote about when I kicked off this effort; giving the state of New York a new accounting system (Addressing the Mess - McGee’s Musings).
We were at the point of cutting over from the old system to the new after two years of development work and extensive training for all the users of the system across the state. One of the critical steps in the conversion was to map all the appropriations and budgets from the old system to the new system. My team had worked out a clever way to do the cutover given that we were talking about several hundred agencies and state departments identified in the 1,500 page state budget.
The results existed on six computer tapes. Each tape was on a reel about a foot in diameter containing several thousand feet of magnetic tape. Today all of this would likely fit on a thumb drive. The tapes were stored and managed in the State Comptroller’s Office computer room on the ground floor. The computer center manager assured us that the data was safe but I was skeptical. I asked Mitch, one of my analysts, to make absolutely certain that no one could touch our tapes. I had requested that we take possession of the tapes for the duration and deliver then to the data center when needed. I was overruled by their manager. He assured me that his systems were reliable until the night that one of the operators tried to use the tapes to run their nightly backups.
The only thing that prevented the data center operators from grabbing our tapes was Mitch. He had secured our tapes in the data center with a chain and a bicycle lock. The data center director was torn between being mad at me for bypassing his system and embarrassed that his staff had nearly wiped out months of work.
Mitch got a nice write up in his performance review and a story about just how trustworthy systems can be when you’ve got people in the loop. I got one about putting faith in your people.