De volta ao redor 1998, the company I worked for at the time received some funding to create a new e-commerce product. We had the full gamut of business requirements to meet. It had to be fast, doado para os usuarios finais, chamativo, multi-lingua, etc. Sad to say, Eu probablemente non tiven como un ambicioso conxunto de traballo a realizar desde os días de gloria.
This effort pre-dated Microsoft.NET. Plain vanilla ASP was still somewhat new (ou polo menos moi estraño para a miña empresa). "Brick and mortar" companies were doomed. Condenado! This is to say that it was pioneering work. Non Hadron Collider traballo pioneiro, pero para nós, no noso pequeno mundo, foi pioneiro traballo.
We were crazy busy. We were doing mini POC’s almost every day, descubrir como manter o estado nun medio inherentemente apátridas, descubrir problemas multi-lingua, row-level security. We even had create a vocabulary to define basic terms (Eu prefería estado persistente, pero por algún motivo, the awkward "statefull" gañou o día).
Como estabamos locamente inventar este produto, the marketing and sales people were out there trying to sell it. Somehow, they managed to sell it to our nightmare scenario. Even though we were designing and implementing an enterprise solution, we really didn’t expect the first customer to use every last feature we built into the product day zero. This customer needed multi-language, a radically different user interface from the "standard" system but with the same business logic. Multi-language was especially hard in this case, porque sempre enfocada en español ou francés, pero neste caso, foi Chinés (que é un conxunto de caracteres de dous bytes e necesario tratamento especial dado a tecnoloxía que usan).
Fast forward a few months and I’m on a Northwest airlines flight to Beijing. I’ve been so busy preparing for this trip that I have almost no idea what it’s like to go there. I had read a book once about how an American had been in China for several years and had learned the language. One day he was walking the city and asked some people for directions. The conversation went something this:
- Americano: "Could you tell me how to get to [XX] rúa?"
- Chinés: "Sorry, we don’t speak English".
- Americano: "Oh, ben eu falar mandarín." e preguntoulle lles de novo en chinés, , Pero de forma máis clara (o mellor que podía).
- Chinés: Moi educadamente, "Sorry, we don’t speak English".
The conversation went on like that for bit and the American gave up in frustration. As he was leaving them he overheard one man speaking to the other, "I could have sworn he was asking for directions to [XX] rúa."
I had picked up a few bits and pieces of other China-related quasi-information and "helpful advice":
- A Korean co-worked told me that the I needed to be careful of the Chinese because "they would try to get me drunk and take advantage of you" no sentido de me presionar en decisións empresariais malas.
- Non foron autorizados a conducir coches (houbo algunha confusión sobre se este era un costume, unha esixencia legal ou simplemente norma do cliente).
- Había regras especiais para pasar pola alfándega.
- Non foron autorizados a usar o diñeiro estadounidense para nada.
- You’re not supposed to leave tips. It’s insulting if you do.
E, finalmente, Eu tiña lembranzas relativamente frescas do Masacre de Tiananmen. When I was at college, I remember seeing real-time Usenet postings as the world looked on in horror.
En resumo, I was very nervous. I wasn’t just normal-nervous in the sense that I was delivering a solution that was orders of magnitude more complicated than anything I had ever done before. I was also worried about accidentally breaking a rule that could get me in trouble.
Estou neste 14 voo de unha hora e que fose de clase empresarial, 14 horas é moito tempo maldito. Hai só tantas formas de entreter-se pola lectura, watching movies or playing with the magnetized cutlery. Even a really good book is hard to read for several hours straight.
Eventualmente, Comecei a ler o material de embalaxe en unha peza de software que eu estaba a man cargando comigo ao cliente, Netscape’s web server. I’m reading the hardware/software requirements, as sinopses de marketing, mirando ao retrato bonito e de súpeto, I zero in on the giant "NOT FOR EXPORT" aviso, algo sobre 128 bit encryption. I stuffed the box back into my carry bag, alertando a cara abaixo (como se iso axudaría) e intentou manter visións de Midnight Express out of my head.
Mirando cara atrás agora, Eu debería ter se preocupar, a todos, cando deixei EEUU, non cando entraba en China 🙂 Non pasou nada desagradable e aínda considero que é a mellor e máis memorable viaxe de negocios que tiven o pracer de facer.
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