Hail to the Chief

I'm a mathematician by apptitude, an accountant by professional training and have strong IT links by a mixture of hobby and work. For the last year or so I've been working on developing a financial reporting system for the organisation where I work.

Today was a major milestone in this project, demonstrating it to the Chief Executive. As always seems the case in such things, the first report I showed him failed. The worst sort of failure, no error message, no clearly wrong results - just a failure to return any results at all. I can't remember whether I mentioned this before, but I always tell the truth. I'm sure a lot of people would be horrified by that and would feel that I was making unnecessarily hard work of life, but I find that (although it can lead to problems at times) it keeps things simple. The truth was given that the system detects who has logged in and what they have permission to see, this was the first time that this particular report had been run, it was also true to say that being at the peak of the organisation his report required more work than anyone else's.

He took the failure in good humour and accepted the alternative of logging in as me and running a report which gave similar results.

Even after nearly thirty-three years working for the same organisation, meetings with the Chief Executive can be quite daunting. But today's encounter gave purpose to what I've been working on and he seemed pleased by what had been achieved. I found the experience uplifting.

I was once accosted by the then Chief Executive in a MacDonalds with detailed follow-up questions from a meeting that we'd had earlier in the day. I was totally spaced-out from a very long very hard day and all my response circuits were frazzled - I couldn't summon up anything to say. After a minute or two, the CE said "Perhaps we'll talk about this tomorrow" and walked back to his exasperated wife. I think it highly unlikely that the current CE would accost me in MacDonalds, for a variety of reasons, but being a blog writer himself (for internal consumption in the organisation), there is perhaps a very small chance that he'll come across this entry. So you see, another way in which telling the truth keeps things simple.