A bunch de bhlianta ó shin, my boss asked me to train some users on a product called Results. Results is an end user reporting tool. It’s roughly analogous to SQL Server Reporting Service or Crystal. Ag an am, bhí sé deartha a reáchtáil ar feadáin glas (e.g. Wyse 50 críochfort) connected to a Unix box via telnet.

My default answer to any question that starts with "Can you … " is "Yes" and that’s where all the trouble started.

The client was a chemical company out in southern California and had just about wrapped up a major ERP implementation based on QAD’s MFG/PRO. The implementation plan now called for training power end users on the Results product.

I wasn’t a big user of this tool and had certainly never trained anyone before. Mar sin féin, Ndearna mé roinnt ranganna oiliúna eile agus bhí tapa ar mo chosa, so I was not too worried. Dennis, an fíor lánaimseartha Torthaí teagascóir, had given me his training material. Looking back on it now, it’s really quite absurd. I didn’t know the product well, had never been formally trained on it and had certainly never taught it. What business did I have training anyone on it?

Chun rudaí deacra logistically, I was asked to go and meet someone in Chicago as part of a pre-sales engagement along the way. The plan was to fly out of New Jersey, téigh go dtí Chicago, meet for an hour with prospect and then continue on to California.

Bhuel, I got to Chicago and the sales guy on my team had made some mistake and never confirmed the meeting. Mar sin,, I showed up and the prospect wasn’t there. Awesome. I pack up and leave and continue on to CA. Somewhere during this process, I find out that the client is learning less than 24 hours before my arrival that "Paul Galvin" is teaching the class, not Dennis. The client loves Dennis. They want to know "who is this Paul Galvin person?" "Why should we trust him?" "Why should we pay for him?" Dennis obviously didn’t subscribe to my "a thabhairt nuacht olc go luath" philosophy. Awesome.

I arrive at the airport and for some incredibly stupid reason, I had checked my luggage. I made it to LAX but my luggage did not. Maidir liom féin, bhfuil a chailliúint bagáiste a lán cosúil le dul tríd an seacht céimeanna de grief. Eventually I make it to the hotel, gan aon bhagáiste, tuirseach, ocras agus ag caitheamh mo (ag anois, an-crumpled) business suit. It takes a long time to travel from Newark — to O’Hare — le cliant — ar ais go dtí O'Hare — agus ar deireadh a LAX.

Bhfaighidh mé mé féin ar deireadh suí sa seomra óstán, munching ar bharra snickers, exhausted and trying to drum up the energy to scan through the training material again so that I won’t look like a complete ass in front of the class. This was a bit of a low point for me at the time.

Dhúisigh mé suas an lá dár gcionn, did my best to smooth out my suit so that I didn’t look like Willy Loman on a bad day and headed on over to the client. As is so often the case, go pearsanta go raibh sí go deas, polite and very pleasant. This stood in stark contrast to her extremely angry emails/voicemails from the previous day. She leads me about 3 miles through building after building to a sectioned off area in a giant chemical warehouse where we will conduct the class for the next three days. The 15 nó 20 assemble mic léinn go mall, most them still expecting Dennis.

Mé ag tosú i gcónaí as mo ranganna oiliúna a thabhairt isteach mé féin, giving some background and writing my contact information on the white board. As I’m saying, "Good morning, my name is Paul Galvin", Scríobh mé mo ainm, email and phone number up on the white board in big letters so that everyone can see it clearly. I address the fact that I’m replacing Dennis and I assure them that I am a suitable replacement, etc. I have everyone briefly tell me their name and what they want to achieve out of the class so that I can tailor things to their specific requirements as I go along. The usual stuff.

We wrap that up and fire up the projector. I go to erase my contact info and … I had written it in permanent marker. I was so embarrassed. In my mind’s eye, it looked like this: There is this "Paul Galvin" person, last minute replacement for our beloved Dennis. He’s wearing a crumpled up business suit and unshaven. He has just written his name huge letters on our white board in marcóir buan. What a sight!

Chríochnaigh sé go léir sona sásta, áfach,. This was a chemical company, tar éis an tsaoil. A grizzled veteran employee pulled something off the shelf and, is dócha de shárú ar rialacháin an EPA, cleared the board. I managed to stay 1/2 day ahead of the class throughout the course and they gave me a good review in the end. This cemented my "pinch hitter" reputation at my company. My luggage arrived the first day, mar sin bhí mé lá i bhfad níos mó presentable dhá agus trí.

Mar a bhí mé ag cur an tsúil dearg ar ais sa bhaile, I was contemplating "lessons learned". There was plenty to contemplate. Communication is key. Tell clients about changes in plan. Don’t ever check your luggage at the airport if you can possibly avoid it. Bring spare "stuff" in case you do check your luggage and it doens’t make it. I think the most important lesson I learned, áfach,, was this: always test a marker in the lower left-hand corner of a white board before writing, in huge letters, "Paul Galvin".

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Due to some oddball United Airlines flights I took in the mid 90’s, I somehow ended up with an offer to transform "unused miles" into about a dozen free magazine subscriptions. That is how I ended up subscribing to Scientific American magazine.

Mar bogearraí / dul i gcomhairle le daoine, we encounter many difficult business requirements in our career. Most the time, we love meeting those requirements and in fact, it’s probably why we think this career is the best in the world. I occasionally wonder just what in the world would I have done with myself if I had been born at any other time in history. How terrible would it be to miss out on the kinds of work I get to do now, at this time and place in world history? I mo thuairimse,: pretty terrible.

Over the years, some of the requirements I’ve faced have been extremely challenging to meet. Complex SharePoint stuff, building web processing frameworks based on non-web-friendly technology, complex BizTalk orchestrations and the like. We can all (hopefully) look proudly back on our career and say, "yeah, that was a hard one to solve, but in the end I pwned that sumbitch!" Níos fearr fós, even more interesting and fun challenges await.

I personally think that my resume, in this respect, is pretty deep and I’m pretty proud of it (though I know my wife will never understand 1/20th of it). But this week, I was reading an article about the Large Hadron Collider in my Scientific American magazine and had one of those rare humbling moments where I realized that despite my "giant" status in certain circles or how deep I think my well of experience, there are real giants in completely different worlds.

The people on the LHC team have some really thorny issues to manage. Consider the Moon. I don’t really think much about the Moon (though I’ve been very suspicious about it since I learned it’s slowing the Earth’s rotation, which can’t be a good thing for us Humans in the long term). Ach, the LHC team does have to worry. LHC’s measuring devices are so sensitive that they are affected by the Moon’s (Earth-rotation-slowing-and-eventually-killing-all-life) gravity. That’s a heck of a requirement to meet — produce correct measurements despite the Moon’s interference.

I was pondering that issue when I read this sentence: "The first level will receive and analyze data from only a subset of all the detector’s components, from which it can pick out promising events based on isolated factors such as whether an energetic muon was spotted flying out at a large angle from the beam axis." Really … ? I don’t play in that kind of sandbox and never will.

Next time I’m out with some friends, I’m going to raise a toast to the good people working on the LHC, hope they don’t successfully weigh the Higgs boson particle and curse the Moon. I suggest you do the same. It will be quite the toast 🙂

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