The Benefits of Tact

Editor's note: Livi's been on my butt (appropriately so) because I've haven't written any blog entries in the past month. Well, today, I had to tell a story in Speech class about a "learning experience" I had. It had to include a moral. I told the following story.

About 15 years ago, I worked at a Data Processing Service Bureau. It was an exciting time, as my job was to migrate Mainframe computer applications from our clients’ systems onto ours.

One day, I was called into my boss’s office to discuss some problems we were having migrating a particular application that the client had developed in-house.

Now I had discussed this previously with my boss and others, and we had collectively determined that the problem was that the application had been poorly written. It had been written with a number of assumptions about its operating environment “hardcoded” into the program, and since the operating environment was changing, these assumptions were no longer correct. But because they were written into the system, they were very difficult to isolate and correct.

Being young (at the time) and brash, I was in favor of overhauling the entire application, completely re-writing it if necessary, and fixing the problem once and for all.

Anyway, I walked into my boss’s office, and was told that the owner of our company was on the speakerphone and wanted to understand the problems we were having with this client’s migration.

Well, it was at this point that I launched into a tirade about the poor quality of the client’s application, using phrases like “crap-code” and “scrap-completely”, when I heard an unfamiliar voice come out of the speakerphone that shouted “There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with our system, and if there’s anything that is full of CRAP around here, it’s YOU!”

It turns out that the owner of our company had been having a meeting with the IT manager of the company whose systems we were migrating, and the two of them had decided to call my boss to get a status of the overall project.

It gets worse, as it turns out that the IT manager had been the programmer that had originally wrote this system that I had just finished calling crap!

Morals: 1) Beware of speakerphones as you never know who is on the other end, and 2) its always best to temper ones opinions, no matter how correctly held, with plenty of tact.