Kapow! Sysadmin!

Recently, I visited a little independent comic store near to where I work to subscribe to a couple of titles for my kids. The shop owner took my email address and said that he would be in touch when new issues arrived. Not hearing anything for a while, I popped back in to the store to find they had a backlog of issues waiting for me. “I thought you’d be in touch?” I said to the owner. “I don’t have time, we’ve got loads of comics waiting to be picked up,’ he replied, waving his arm behind him where I could see shelves of boxes stuffed with issues and dividers with people’s names scrawled on them. I suggested that was a lot of stock to have to carry and he shrugged in agreement while showing me a report he used to populate the boxes with customer details and list of what publications they wanted reserving.

Over the next few days I mulled the situation over. This seemed like a simple problem to solve for a system administrator. All it required was a bit of scripting and taking the output of the report and generating reminder emails. People would know when their comics were in and the shop would benefit—a doddle! The next time I went in I mentioned to the owner that I’d been thinking about his problem and automating things was my speciality, and I could easily come up with a system to help clear his huge stock of comics. “So,” he said, after a few moments consideration, “What you’re saying is—you can build a robot to put the comics in the boxes for me, can you?” This sounded so familiar to me, I couldn’t help being reminded of a few large projects that I had been on where we suffered from this disconnect between what a team is building and what the customer thinks they are going to receive at the end of the project. And if anyone has any tips on how to build a comic-book-sorting robot, please email me. jolyon.brown@gmail.com