(no subject)

[geekchick]

Oy. From The Daily WTF (always good for making one feel not quite so alone when contemplating inflicting bodily harm on a coworker), a story about dealing with a small consulting company with "over twenty-five years combined experience working at Oracle Corporation". The email exchange begins with

We need your database in order to develop the reports
and triggers against it. Could you send a copy of your
production database?

and goes downhill rapidly from there, meandering by "please ship us your QA server" (not the database, the entire box) on its way to ending up with a request to "have your dba give us a call here and tell us what command to run to import a database". Perhaps they should've been more specific about the nature of their combined experience working for Oracle; one guy with around a year as a developer and four others with six years each in the mailroom?

Comments

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

*boggle* I learned to design reports and forms in my first Oracle class. And I didn't need anyone's QA server to do it.
They should hire me. I'm cheap and almost qualified!

[geekchick]

I love that the suggestion that they could have a copy of the QA database instead of the production one was met with "Great! Please ship your QA server to [mailing address]". I mean, if it was some really funky development environment that would take weeks to replicate exactly, I can see shipping a hard drive or a full system if necessary. I'm pretty sure this wasn't one of those though.

Sadly, the guy reports they still haven't kicked these consultants out, otherwise I suspect you could make a killing doing a bit of sideline work. If you know how to do an import, you're already ahead of them apparently. ;)

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Had I known it was that easy, I'd have gone into consulting ages ago.