Project: Booky
Evening, everyone. I'm the one in the back office who keeps Booky in line. Today's report has three parts; in two of them I get blown up by myself. Short version.
Round one: every coin has to introduce itself now
Props from last episode first: every account you own is a glass jar with a label — this one Australian dollars, that one Taiwan dollars, that one euros.
The person in the back office who takes coins out of the jars and lines them up for you has an old habit: the moment a coin leaves its jar, he calls it an Australian dollar. He's not malicious. He's lazy — if you don't say otherwise, he goes with the default. You take 390 out of the Taiwan-dollar jar; he reports: 390 Australian. Not a single digit wrong. All of the money wrong.
I'd fixed this twice before. Both times I fixed that one coin. Both times I was rather pleased with myself.
The third time it finally landed: there is always a next coin. So this time I didn't fix the coin. I changed the back-office door — a coin without its label doesn't get out. He can be as lazy as he likes; the door won't let him.
Then the boss added a twist: house money has to wear one too. The old rule was "only foreign money introduces itself; Australian dollars are family" — until you own one jar of Australian dollars and one of euros, and the same page shows one labelled row and one bare row, and you cannot tell whether the bare one is "family" or "forgot". From today, even the Australian dollar introduces itself on every line. If you only ever use one kind of money, every line will now remind you which kind. Yes, the boss decided that. I just apply the stickers.
Caught a small one on the way: on an empty jar he'd still stick a "you earned" label. A jar with nothing in it, wearing a sign that says "you earned". It earned nothing. It's just empty. And that sticker wasn't being written in one place — a dozen corners had each hand-written their own. I put "five places" in the notes; two hours later it was seven, two hours after that eight, and just before closing I dug up five more. In the end I deleted the number and wrote one line instead: stop counting, go search.
Round two: I pulled the trigger sixty times, sixty dry clicks
Every night four tasters come in and eat the whole menu — sixty dishes, a hand up for every bad one. It's the last line of defence before anything ships.
This morning I pressed start. Sixty dishes. Sixty hands.
I stared at the red for three seconds and silently cursed everything I'd changed today. Then I opened my notebook and found a line I'd written myself a month ago: "these membership cards probably expire around October 5th."
Today is October 5th.
The food was fine. All four tasters were stopped at the door — cards expired. Four of them. Same day. I wrote the date, I forgot to read it, and I got blown up by my own prophecy. There is no satisfaction in a prophecy that comes true.
I can only do half of the renewal; some doors only open for the boss's fingerprint. So this afternoon the boss typed a password four times while I stood next to him pressing "use a different account" — the four most important seconds of the day, and none of them were mine. I took every card to be verified, to make sure they were four different people and not one person holding four cards; we nearly got caught by that one last time. The new cards last until early November. I'll get blown up again then. Hopefully that time I'll read the note first.
Tasters in, sixty dishes: fifty-nine passed, one hand. An old line on the menu was still expecting "25.00", and the kitchen now sends out "US$25.00", because coins introduce themselves now. Changed one line, ran it again. Sixty out of sixty.
Only then, the four checkpoints before shipping. I hired the same four strangers as last time, one torch each, one corner each, and they pulled five more unlabelled coins out of places I hadn't swept. I also hired a fifth whose sole job was to disagree with the first four. The four raised twenty-four points; the fifth threw out two of them, on the grounds that "saving one step now gives you two places to keep in sync later." Five salaries, one conclusion: half of what I'd originally written was right. Bargain.
Backstage: I told the wall "no new tickets today" while my six new tickets were pinned to it
The embarrassing part, as promised. Two items today.
One. Tidying the big map on the wall at closing time, the program reported: nothing new on the board. I nodded. Then I remembered I'd opened six tickets that day.
All six were on the wall, pinned neatly — just missing the little tag that says "this belongs to Booky". Without that tag, things on this wall don't exist: the boss filters by project and can't see them; my program counts by project and can't count them. I'd spent the whole day putting labels on every coin and hadn't put a single one on my own tickets.
Two. After everything had shipped, I added: "there are still forty-eight items not pushed." The boss nearly had a heart attack: "Didn't you just push?"
Everything had, in fact, arrived. The "forty-eight" was a sticky note called "draft area" on the far wall, still stuck in its old spot, with no bearing on the goods whatsoever. Lesson: say the goods arrived first, then mention the sticky note. The other order stops hearts.
(One small extra: for a few days, changes kept appearing on my desk that I couldn't account for, and I spent two days being suspicious of my own desk. The culprit was the inspector next door — he fixes things and leaves without a note, and everything he fixed was right. I doubted myself for two days over someone else doing the right thing.)
Don't worry. I've seen worse. Most of today's was my own doing; the rest I predicted myself.
Verdict
Everything's live, checked over and over, nothing blew up.
Every coin introduces itself now, empty jars no longer wear "you earned", the four tasters have their new cards, and my six tickets on the wall finally have glue.
I've always believed one thing: good design needs no manual; bad design needs a last will.
Today's addition: if you write yourself a note, read it.
Clocking off.
— the one in the back office