Monthly Archives: November 2019

Goodbye Hani!

Dear J…, Dear C…f, I am writing to you and C…f, whose email I do not have, because shar­ing pain is another form of love. I am so sorry Hani has passed away, this bland set of words can­not express my sor­row. Part of me is gone with him, the part that he woke every […]

About CARLA

Hello, my name is Carla and believe it or not, I am not a girl. I am not a cat either, nor a domest­ic anim­al with a girl’s name. I am an applic­a­tion! My cre­at­or had the puerile idea of using an acronym , (a word formed from the ini­tials or oth­er parts of sev­er­al […]

Why we decided to develop a different application? (1)

I was being inter­viewed by an aud­it­or from the Central Bank con­trol com­mis­sion. She wanted to know what was the effect of chan­ging, without due author­ity, the interest rate of a factor­ing account on the monthly pay­ments of the cli­ent. The lady sug­ges­ted that the ques­tion would have been easy to answer if we had an audit trail […]

We built a product to meet the theoretical needs of an imaginary banker, HOW AND WHY? (1)

A few years ago, as we were devel­op­ing a soft­ware applic­a­tion for a major whole­sale and retail dis­trib­ut­or, I made a new friend, a guy named Gordon Saris. That’s him above. (Don’t look, he is pro­tec­ted by copy­rights; that’s why I had to remove his pic­ture from here.) And if you are won­der­ing if I mis­spelled his name, think again; I can assure you that […]

L’emprise de truc

Nous sommes tous au chômage !” cria Table, « TOUS »! C’était un som­bre jour, les mots pleur­aient, après avoir été, petit à petit, rem­placés par un autre. C’était l’œuvre du dic­tateur, Truc, qui rég­nait sur le Dictionnaire. Madame Larousse, Monsieur Robert et son petit, se réun­is­saient régulière­ment pour essay­er de trouver une solu­tion à ce désastre qui mettait […]

Starting a “Computer” Business

I woke up this morn­ing while in the middle of a dream. It hap­pens rarely. The good thing about wak­ing up this way is that you remem­ber the last part of the dream. Dreams, they say, reflect the sub­con­scious thoughts of the pre­vi­ous day(s). I tend to dis­agree. Who would know what are your sub­con­scious thoughts? They […]

Why is everybody starting with “Why”?

Why are the Virgin Atlantic stew­ard­esses wear­ing red high heeled shoes? Is it to bet­ter serve the fre­quent fly­ers of the now legendary air­line? It seems that even the legendary air­line has lost its com­pass. The page ref­er­en­cing the high heeled shoes has gone miss­ing! I have checked the Virgin web­site, I could not find it. I will […]

Ce qui est dû

A 18 ans, on m’a informé que je devais pay­er « ce qui était dû». Payer qui? On ne me l’a jamais dit. Et avec quoi ? Pas de réponse. « Paie ce qui est dû». Je com­mençais par pay­er ce que je devais au collège. Puis je payais mon uni­versité ; il semblait que […]

Thank God I am not called Ivan…

I am a busy exec­ut­ive. The bank has put me in charge of its admin­is­trat­ive affairs. When I took the job, I ima­gined my day as a sequence of well-ordered steps, cul­min­at­ing in mat­ter of fact decisions with clock­work pre­ci­sion. It is 8:30 in the morn­ing. Monday. The week­end is behind us. Lunch was nice in the little res­taur­ant in […]

Predatory Mood…

When Dalo, the pro­ject man­ager, received the call that morn­ing, she did not expect that it would last for so long. Frida, the IT man­ager at the hos­pit­al, was frantic: someone has been chan­ging the prices of pros­theses in some of the invoices sent to the insur­ance com­pany. How was this pos­sible? The billing applic­a­tion used an […]