NaNo Excerpt: Is This Too Confusing?
This is from the end of Chapter Ten. I’m not entirely sure it will make sense to anyone but me because of the technical stuff. I tried to “dumb” it down for folks like my computer-phobic mother, but I’m not entirely sure the whole thing makes sense…though the technical jargon isn’t supposed to be the point of the scene anyone.
Any comments, suggestions, questions would be well-received.
There were days when Nora did not just want to beat her own aching head on her desk but she wanted to beat her co-workers into unconsciousness. They seemed to thrive on unnecessary office drama and if there was not any to feed off of, they would create it themselves.
Today, Violet was at the top of Nora’s beating list. Violet was fashion-dysfunctional version of Roberta, a diva in tight pedal pushers, tank tops and flip-flops. Up until recently, her division, a kind of data depository warehouse that just collected data and ran miscellaneous reports, had been the relatively unknown, not talked about division of Information Systems. They were housed off-site and probably very few of the computer users even knew they existed. However, Adam, Violet’s power-hungry boss, was changing all of that. He had visions of being the commander-and-chief over the Information Systems Department and that meant getting noticed and working miracles. Violet intended to ride his coattails to the top.
Back in June, Violet unofficially took over the electronic signature project. People were still trying to figure out how it happened. By that time, Nora’s work on the project had already been completed and she didn’t attend the meetings anymore, but rumors ran rampant, of course. Adam had arrived uninvited to a project meeting with The Company big wigs and promised them that his division could solve all of their problems with the flailing project. He basically promised them the moon, Mars, and Saturn gift wrapped in a pretty bedazzled box.
Next thing Nora knew, Violet was telling the project team that the project itself was being expanded so that her depository database could receive HL7 ADT interface messages in real time rather than get their information from a batch SQL query of the main application’s databases each day. Since HL7 ADT interfaces are the easiest to create, Nora thought that it should in no way affect the project deadline of the end of July.
However, it was now August.
First of all, HL7 ADT interfaces are easy to build when the receiving side is already set up to receive HL7 messages. However, the data depository application had never been set up to do so and it quickly became apparent that the Vendor of that particular application had no experience at all with the standard interface structure.
When Nora met with Violet back in June, she realized that The Company’s interface documentation for HL7 ADTs needed to be updated as some of the details were not clear – for example some message structures between different types of messages differed but were not clearly noted in the home-grown documentation. Nora volunteered in that meeting to do the analysis, update the documentation, and let everyone know once it was complete.
On June 23rd, Nora had sent an email explaining that the HL7 ADT documentation had been drastically altered during the update. She indicated in her email that Software Vendors should be provided with the updated documentation.
Yesterday, Violet had called Nora just as she was getting started on her work for the day and without asking, thrust Nora into a conference call with her Vendor because they had questions about the interfaces. This conversation led to Nora altering the documentation again to cater to what she mentally termed “the slow-minded.”
Then Violet emailed Nora because the AL1 segment was coming before the DG1 segment and it was crashing her database. However, Violet could not tell Nora what kind of interface message was causing this behavior and got in a serious huff when Nora told her that she could not even begin to examine the problem until she got an example. Only days before Violet had rather rudely and condescendingly told a room of non-computer types that they were not even allowed to talk to her until they provided examples of their issues. Nora was struck with the irony even if Violet wasn’t.
Violet finally emailed Nora an example, and Nora looked it up in the publicly- provided documentation and the program that generates that particular type of message and noted that the AL1 actually was supposed to appear before a DG1 in an A05 ADT message, though it is the opposite in an A08 ADT message. However her complaint was about the A05 ADT message specifically.
Playing email ping pong, Nora emailed Violet and told her that it is working as designed and that the documentation indicates this is the case. Nora asked her if she had checked the documentation.
In response, Violet wrote an accusatory email back claiming that since the documentation was not right on an earlier issue, she assumed that it was not reliable; therefore she decided she would just ask Nora instead.
Nora could not figure out how it was possible to assume there was an issue when the documentation and the data messages actually matched.
Later that day Violet, tired of playing email ping- pong, called Nora directly to complain that the A05 ADT message was still crashing her database because the AL1 was appearing before the DG1. She insisted that it did not match the documentation. After a few minutes, Nora finally determined that the real issue was that Violet was still using the original documentation to design her new database tables. On top of that, she never gave the updated documentation to the Vendor so their whole interface has been built based on the unclear documentation. Once Nora explained again about the updated documentation and where it publicly available on The Company’s network and in another huff, Violet hung up on Nora.
Less than twenty minutes later, Violet called Nora again to ask what documentation she was supposed to be look at and where it was.
While they were on the phone, Violet reported another issue with the A08 ADT messages being out of order, which perplexed Nora. However, she did a little research and discovered that somehow when they were developing Department P’s software changes that were never installed, the Department P-specific A08 program somehow overwrote the A08 program for a specific type of update but only in the Test environment. Nora recompiled the A08 ADT program and reloaded it into the Test environment and tested it and everything was fine. Nora sent an email to notify everyone of this fix.
However, this morning Violet sent an email to Nora’s bosses, her boss, the Project Lead, and the actual Interface person assigned to the project to report this persistent A08 ADT issue with Department P’s A08s that were crashing her interface and basically to accuse Nora of not assisting her in a timely manner. In retaliation, Nora politely emailed Violet and everyone else back and reminded her that Nora had in fact resolved the issue the day before and test data entered after that time would be valid.
Violet’s response was another nasty email saying that the Interface person and she had discussed it and she wanted a guarantee that the test data was going to be fine now. With all of the development continuously occurring in the Test environment by the entire department, there were no guarantees about such things. However, Nora sent her a meticulous email explaining what the problem had been, that it had been resolved, and that Nora herself was confident that there would be no more problems with Department P Interface changes because none of should have been in the Test environment anymore.
Determined to have the last word, Violet then sent another email explaining that there must have been some confusion and she would begin retesting today with new data. There was no apology for the nastiness.
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