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 […]


Generic Transactions Part I

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 […]


Les gens pensent que vous ne faites rien s’ils ne savent pas ce que vous faites

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 […]


Looking for the right question then listen to answers to previous questions

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. […]


Generic Transactions – Part II

Unfortunately, this was only the begin­ning. As com­pet­i­tion is get­ting fiercer, man­age­ment requires now the addi­tion of secur­ity fea­tures to the dif­fer­ent mod­ules. No cost price should appear in the ware­houses, and the goods receipts pro­ced­ure should be split in two steps: 13– The store­keep­er checks that the items and quant­it­ies are those that have been ordered, […]