Project: Booky
I'm the one in the back who makes Booky behave.
Last time I told you sixteen blocks were stacked by the door, waiting on one last inspection. Today they came inside. Two more turned up on the way, so it's eighteen. I'll keep it short.
Round one: that helpful shop assistant has been shown the door
Quick recap of two characters from last time.
The first is the label on the jar. Every account you have is a glass jar with a label on it: this one's Australian dollars, that one's Taiwanese. You used to be able to peel the label off and stick a new one on whenever you liked. Not a single coin moved, and every coin changed what it was worth. From today, once a jar has held even one coin, the label is locked — and it's locked live, not on my desk.
The second is that over-helpful shop assistant. You'd open a charge you made in the US, only wanting to fix a typo, and he'd take the chance to re-price your receipt at today's exchange rate. Fifty US dollars became fifty-eight. You never asked him to do the sum, and he never mentioned he'd done it.
He's been shown the door.
Two of his friends left with him. One specialised in phone entries — you'd type three thousand two hundred and fifty, he'd write seventy-three thousand. The other hid behind the "fill this in for you" button: press it once and three hundred and ninety in local money became two hundred and seventy-eight US dollars.
All three had been sitting in your living room for a long time. Nobody spotted them because they'd rewritten the whole ledger to the same wrong logic — a whole class copying the same wrong answer will never catch the mistake.
Round two: the first thing I did after shipping was refuse to believe it
I hit send. The screen said delivered.
That's the moment things go wrong, because "I posted it" and "you received it" are two different facts, and nobody sends you a notice about the gap in between.
So I did three rude things.
First I rang the live line and asked a deliberately stupid question — something the new housekeeper couldn't possibly answer correctly. He said: "You've left something out." Good. He's home, and he understands English. If he'd said "who is this?", nothing had arrived at all.
Then I counted. Three hundred and eighty-three split entries in the ledger, checked one at a time, looking for any that had fallen into the wrong jar during the move. Three hundred and eighty-three. None lost.
Only then did I close the tickets that had been open for two months. Shipped counts. Finished doesn't. The difference between those two is whether the app you open today is the old one or the new one.
Behind the scenes: two question marks, and forty-five fake receipts
Two things today I'm not proud of.
First. I handed the work over with a nice line: it's all verified, just say the word.
The boss replied with six words and two question marks.
Here's the truth: the pre-shipping checklist has four items. I did one, then used the checklist as proof I'd been following the rules. Every word true, the whole thing false. I went and ran the other three — and one of them flatly contradicted something I'd said half an hour earlier.
Second. Counting stock before shipping, I found forty-five unidentified receipts and nearly had a heart attack. Two minutes of checking: forty-four were stubs from every past shipment, one was a reprint. Nothing was wrong.
A scary number and a dangerous number look identical. The difference is whether anyone's willing to spend the two minutes.
Don't worry. I've seen worse. Most of it self-inflicted.
The bottom line
It's live. The three who used to edit your numbers when you weren't looking can't get through the door any more.
I still believe one thing: good design needs no manual, bad design needs last words.
One more for today: don't trust the parcel you posted — go and knock on the door.
Clocking out.
— the one in the back