Month: May 2008

The Unilangual City

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“Bonn – The UN City”. Das ist der Slogan, mit dem die Stadt Bonn wirbt. Klar, denn im Moment läuft ja die CDB-Vertragstaatenkonferenz an. Immerhin scheinbar so groß und relevant, dass sich einige Mobilfunkprovider im Vorfeld nicht zu schade waren, ihre UMTS-Struktur in und um Bonn kräftig neu zu organisieren (zu bemerken an zahlreichen Betriebsstörungen bei D2 und E-Plus in den letzten zwei Wochen).

Nachdem ich heute zwei orientierungslosen Konferenzteilnehmern am Hauptbahnhof beim Warten auf die 66 bei der Zielfindung Richtung Godesberg geholfen habe, weil sie selber völlig überfordert waren, stellen sich mir nur zwei Fragen:

1. Wie kann es sein, dass es eine Stadt, die nicht erst seit gestern einen UN-Campus beheimatet es nicht auf die Reihe bekommt, ihren öffentlichen Nahverkehr zweisprachig auszuschildern?
2. Wo ist auf einmal das ganze sonst mehr oder weniger sinnlos rumstehende SWB-Servicepersonal hin?

Welcome to Bonn, the UN(ilangual) City.

Wasting Portage big time or: What the customer REALLY wanted…

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Probably everyone who has been trough some semi-serious kind of programming 101 course has probably been presented with this:

Your lecturer probably told you that this is a common problem amongst software developers. However, as I just learned, it seems to be a diseaseproblem with the entire IT industry.

So what happened? I was visited by a Dell technician because my laptop backlight was broken. He replaced the spare part pretty quickly which made me pretty happy. However, we noticed that some screws needed replacements and some (small) bumpers were missing. My Laptop has two kinds of bumpers, two big, longish ones and several smaller, roundish one. So he was kind enough to order new screws and (small) bumpers with the Dell hotline who promised to send the parts promptly. And when I pulled the envelope from my post box the other day I was a happy camper… until I realized there were six(!) more left in the box. So I took them all and if you lay them out, it looks pretty impressive:

But the technician ordered just 1 set of screws and 6 small bumpers. So how could that add up to 7 air-damped envelopes?? Right, as you probably just guessed (out of your mathematically trained gut), each bumper came in its own envelope. So if you lay out the contents, it doesn’t look soo impressive anymore:

And did you realize something else? I am now sitting here with seven large bumpers, of which I can make use of none (well, I will probably replace the old ones that are still there, but that wasn’t the actual problem at all, and I still would have five spare…)

Closing remarks

  • I am still very satisfied with Dell, but I found this just too remarkable not to blog.
  • Yes, I am aware of the fact that it’s cheaper to pay for portage multiple times instead of paying someone to make one delivery of all parts belonging to a shipment. But this is really an extreme. Plus it’s extremely funny that those expenses basically were payed unnecessary.

Update: I just talked to the hotline and they will send me a complete service kit (in one shipment) by the day after tomorrow. Yay!