This Will Only Sting For a Second or Two…
Wednesday morning I headed east across the Cascades to a client I have in Othello, Washington. If you turn, in your Rand McNally atlas, to the map of Nowhere and move your finger as close to the midpoint as you can reckon, you’ll have found it. No one can tell me how it came by its name. Everyone I ask vaguely mentions Shakespeare, and a Google search does the same, positing that it came of a local doyenne with a love of the Bard. I’m thinking it has more to do with a Christmas Eve breach-birth of a calf with two asses and no heads and the resulting headline “Local 4-H Members Make Beast With Two Backs!” Or not.
I’m over here to do a software upgrade, an exquisite torture that software companies annually inflict on their customers under the pretense of functional improvements, bug fixes and compliance with year-end tax form requirements. The piteous cries of my cell phone attest to the mangled landscape of my December activities. I’ve downloaded the Abu Ghraib ring-tone from Verizon for realistic effect.
I had planned to be over here for just a day and night and hie me back to Seattle in time to make whatever paltry Christmas preparations I could make in 48 hours but, as often happens in these enterprises, there was a Glitch. I had finished the upgrade and data conversion and was ticking off the last few points in my checklist when my client said, “My GL doesn’t balance.”
“What do you mean, ‘it doesn’t balance’? It balanced before the conversion. You must have done something to it.” When in doubt, blame the victim.
WTF. I ran the conversion again, same result, duplicated in each of several companies in the database. Turns out that the client’s old database was like a Superfund site that over the years had accreted a protective cap that shielded the populace from its subterranean toxins of corrupt and out-of-balance journals. The backhoe of the data conversion ripped away this beneficent layer and released the murky poison of the previous decade’s transgressions against double-entry accounting, and I’ve spent the last day and a half in my consultant’s haz-mat suit desperately trying to halt its spread. I’ve finally concocted a couple 55-gallon drums of palliative journal entries that, while not necessarily purging the site, will restore the protective cap. Until the next fool comes along with a backhoe and a mouthful of bright, shiny promises.
