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Project Disablers: Can’t live with ‘em, Can’t shoot ‘em

Cleansing emotion and turf issues is paramount to project success

Randy C. Hice

The masked intruder didn’t realize that the home invasion he was planning would come with dire consequences. Our backyard sports a 700-foot split rail fence, closed in with a wire mesh to keep Chester, our Golden Retriever contained. Before the fence, I would be on a road trip somewhere and get a panicked call from home that Chester had taken off at full speed after a coyote. In our neighborhood, coyotes have been snacking on housecats and dogs of all sizes with metronomic regularity. In one case, a coyote saw a “doggie door” at a house and decided that this was a convenient way to slip in, grab a Bichon Frise, and exit with a nice, fluffy meal-to-go (maybe a Bichon with fries?)

Most coyotes are terrified of humans. I keep a boat air horn in the cupboard next to the back door to scare the living hell out of them. Coyotes don’t like such unpleasant encounters, and will remember an ear-splitting blast as a sign of hostile treatment.

I went out for the paper a few months ago, and 20 feet from my front door was a very large coyote. I thought nothing of it, and made a quick flinching move towards him. Ninety-nine percent of the time, a quick move will send them into an instant overdrive sprint for cover. This was the one percent time when this big guy, fattened on a steady diet of rabbits, decided to take a more bellicose stance. When I moved towards him, he turned towards me, and held his ground; his eyes fixed on mine….kind of a Coyote ‘make my day’ moment. Deciding that starting the day beating a coyote with the Wall Street Journal was not what I had planned, I gave way and retreated.

In our backyard, I have a small garden. Over the years, I’ve had success with carrots, green beans, radishes and tomatoes, but things like melons and peppers die immediately as though I’d sprayed them with Weed-B-Gone. I don’t really care about much except fresh carrots and tomatoes though, and work to protect them. As a hedge against garden failures, largely a function of my poor skills, and the heavy clay soil of Colorado, I also have pots on my back porch with various species of tomatoes. These seem to do better than my garden, especially this year when I forgot to turn my exit chute from my lawnmower tractor away from the garden, and managed to spray a few thousand weed seeds into the garden. If Russian Thistle was a delicacy, I could feed all of Denver. Alas, the nasty weed must be handled with leather gloves; using cloth gloves is like giving a massage to a porcupine.

So, after coddling my porch tomatoes in light of the hostile takeover of my garden by the Russian Thistle, I have been very protective of my crop this year. But two weeks ago, a red tomato looked as though it had been pecked. The beautiful, yet annoying Western Magpie was my prime suspect. A member of the jay family, these large black and white birds have an irritating squawk and are renowned for the ability to tear apart trash bags at the curb and splay their contents all over the road. I strung up fishing line to deter the birds, who detest running into monofilament during their landing approach. But I kept seeing tomatoes disappear at the rate of one a day, and now, I had to declare war.

I now figured that a squirrel, heretofore innocuous, save for the entertainment of watching Chester try to catch him running along the fence, was the culprit. Sure enough, a few nights after I’d lost about three more tomatoes, Chester was barking like crazy near some poplar trees beyond our fence. I aimed my super high-intensity LED flashlight, and saw two eyes in the tree reflecting back at me. I walked underneath the tree, and saw what I thought was two or three squirrels huddled together. Then I realized it was one animal, with a long black-ringed tail… racoon.

He didn’t like the light I was hitting him with, but I figured a little photonic disorientation was the least of his problems. I ducked into the house and returned with a Browning Buckmark 22 LR pistol, equipped with a Fast Fire holographic sight. As I headed back to the tree, I thought it was ironic that my next door neighbor was hosting a gun control rally, and there were perhaps 150 people in and about her house. ‘Ah well, this should be interesting’ I said to myself as I chambered a round.

I went back to the tree and with my flashlight in one hand, clicked off the safety. I’m not a hunter, and don’t make a habit of rubbing out animals, not even tomato thieves, but I thought a good scare would incentivize the masked marauder into seeking out happier hunting grounds; maybe my gun control neighbor’s garden?

I pointed the floating red holographic dot just above his head, and let a round go. The loud crack caused the coon to jump to the ground with astonishing speed, and waddle his fat posterior along the fence as he headed away. Sure, if I really wanted to add a coonskin cap to my wardrobe, I could probably have clicked off another 10 rounds, but there were a number of granite rocks so perfectly positioned between me and another neighbor up the hill, and knowing that bullets following a angle of inflection = angle of reflection pattern, I figured that a few bullets would fly through my neighbor’s picture window, into the living room of their 8000 sq ft house, shatter their 60-inch plasma TV, and send them diving for cover.

But the most immediate problem was my gun control neighbors, likely apoplectic at the sharp report of the pistol. How many of them had already dialed 911 on their cell phones? Evidently, they identified the sound as just another kid touching off leftover fireworks, and seemingly went back to their chardonnay.

Sorting through the parade of tomato-grabbing suspects is not unlike the process used to debug laboratory informatics system failures. In the old days, the suspects were many. If a LIMS was being used to collect information from, say a UV/VIS and, as was common in the mid 90s, data just decided not to show up, a chain of events was triggered. I remembered being on site when just such a failure occurred. A flow chart comes to mind quickly:

• Is the instrument working?
• Is the cable from the instrument connected to the interface box?
• Is the interface box connected to the network?
• Is the network running?
• Is the LIMS monitor process looking for port data still running?
• Is LIMS running?

Okay, you get the picture. There are multiple sources of failure in these cases. I did ferret out the problem. It was an overzealous and autocratic IT guy who changed everyone’s user names from firstname_lastname to firstname.lastname for God only knows what reason. This caused LIMS to say, “Who the hell are you?” I did have words with the IT guy, who was always about two blood pressure points from a stroke on a good day and, as I chewed on him, I tried to imagine which vein on his head would be the first to pop.

However, the multivariate rat’s nest of problems in a system with hooks everywhere is at least one of the motivators for people moving toward centrally-served informatics solutions. Why not reduce the points of failure in a system? Of course, centralized management of systems has always been the apple in the eye of the IT person who wants to protect his/her turf, and also protect users from their own worst enemies: themselves. But companies also seek out ways to consolidate operations and tear down fiefdoms, and forcing renegade groups from the not-invented-here pedestal is certainly one way of doing so. Of course, it is difficult to make such changes internally. There is a rule of thumb that says that; the larger a company is, the harder it is to effect change. And it’s not always a function of corporate size. Let’s not forget the demons of politics that include, among a great many other things, the axiom that one person’s success may be a win for the corporation while contemporaneously putting the airbrakes on the career of another. So, the agents of change are challenged when considering circling the wagons of IT liability and corporate productivity while some people will die making the case that they should stand alone because their operations are either hyper-efficient or woefully misunderstood.

It is best, therefore, to have vendors or other consultative resources assisting with the process of change. I always had a pet saying I would throw out at meetings: “The definition of a consultant is a person who can take bullets from all angles.”

Cleansing emotion and turf issues from corporate planning and governance of informatics projects is paramount to not only project success, but getting the damned thing out of the starting gate in the first place. At least it seems better than gunplay to solve the problem.

Randy Hice is Director, Strategic Consulting at STARLIMS. He may be reached at editor@ScientificComputing.com.