End User Relations, and other scams

A couple of days ago, I received one of those "419" scam emails - the ones which tell the story of a dying rich husband/oil sheikh/dictator/mongoose and ask you for assistance in laundering the bank-shatteringly huge amount of funds that they left in their will to "Randomly Chosen Person on the Internet". Despite the implausibility of them, many people with more money than sense believe them every year and have vast amounts of cash extracted from them, correcting their sense to money ratio.

In fact, this one announced in the subject line that Jennifer Wilson was dying of cancer. When I read it at first it gave me quite a shock because that's the name of one of my friends from computer science, so in return for the nasty surprise (and because I'd been reading a number of counter-scam websites recently) I decided to email back with a fabricated story of my own - I haven't yet received a reply, though. On reflection, calling myself Leonard Sopcloth and saying that I was a member of the cult of Dongrel might have been pushing the believability envelope a little. Practice makes perfect.

Throughout the week I've been organising testing interviews. The procedure feels slightly like being a driving examiner, with me sitting with the testing folder ticking through a list of tasks that are manageable by the user. I feel that the process of doing them would be mildly distressing if I had written the code, because we seem to have selected the most enthusiastic destructive testers ever and a huge number of holes are being spotted, but as it is I can just bring the vast list of suggested changes back to people in the department and it becomes their responsibility to correct or ignore them as they please. It's just as well that I can write quickly. I would actually bring my laptop with me to take the changes down as I go along, but I pulled all the keys off that a while ago and rearranged them to Dvorak as an experiment (it's getting easier).

Unfortunately, after taking a huge amount of paper notes, some of which were relevant to the parts we were actually testing and some of which were not, the last testing interview I ran ended rather abruptly when all the servers went down simultaneously. ITS had decided to have a computer-hurling contest* and the entire system was down until about half an hour ago. Which is just as well, because I've got to go and do another appointment now.

* N.B. I made this up