How many times do I have to demonstrate this???

Marc was amazingly close to the mark in his response when I wrote about having to travel to The Philippines yet again. When I arrived at the customer site this morning it was to discover that everything was working as designed.

It seems that someone assigned the same IP address twice. Not just any IP address; no sirree bob, that'd be too easy. It had to be the one assigned to a headless PC in our system. The process it runs has no user interface - it's just there. And, as I was on the road between Manila and Baguio, their network people noticed that it had dropped off the network and investigated, found a duplicated IP address and reassigned it. So far so good - they have systems in place to notice these things. (Let's not ask why they don't use DHCP in a network of thousands of systems).

So, as already noted, it was all up and running when I arrived this morning. Annoying but there you have it. Except that this was just the start of the annoyances. Because nothing would do but that I demonstrate, once again, the entire system from go to whoa. The exact same demonstration I did on June 23rd this year. It takes a couple of hours in total, which isn't too bad, except that I have to wait a couple of hours for machine 1 to be available and then wait another couple of hours for the second machine to be available and then yet more time for another machine to be available.

That's this customer in a nutshell. Loud yelling if something doesn't work quite right but when you spend the 40 hours to get here suddenly the machine that isn't quite up to the mark is essential to production and they couldn't possibly interrupt production to allow time on it.

And no amount of explanation could convince the customer that he was wasting my time. If they were paying cold hard cash for the waste of time it wouldn't be quite so bad but this is a warranty job and no, I have no say in whether it's judged to be within the scope of the warranty or not.

So all I could do was grit my teeth, smile the insincere smile of the poor bastard caught between a rock and a hard place and do the demo again.

I wonder if I'll have to demo it again next month if someone duplicates the IP address again?