Evariste

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In an ideal busi­ness world, doc­u­ments travel across the depart­ments with ease and mono­tony. We say that they flow. Unfortunately, things are nev­er this sim­ple. External factors, which are sel­dom under our con­trol, con­tinu­ously influ­ence our busi­ness. Our doc­u­ments have to per­form feats to reach their final des­tin­a­tion, and some­times they nev­er do. EXTREMELY SIMPLE SCENARIO […]

People think that you are doing noth­ing if they don’t know what you are doing! A good friend of mine, not the talk­at­ive type, mind you, came up with this say­ing one even­ing I was com­plain­ing that very few people appre­ci­ated what I did. This encour­aged me to start this blog, to share what I was doing, and to […]

Every once in a while a great ques­tion is asked, and the imme­di­ate reac­tion of people listen­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion will say:“That’s it! You have hit the nail on the head!” Strange thing is that the answer to the ques­tion is not forth­com­ing, it only opens the door to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the prob­lem. […]