How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 4. Nancy

I met Nancy (her real name) in 1994 in Denver, Colorado. Again, on a Wednesday. Like a lot of companies I visited back then, the company she worked for had bought a big Oracle Financials software license.

The engagement started off in the typical way. I flew Monday morning into Stapleton Airport, drove to the office, and as soon as I got there, we had a big meeting. A dozen or more people ate donuts and drank coffee in a conference room until the meeting was called to order. DBAs and various technical specialists all sat together on the lefthand side of a long conference table. Users and system owners all sat together on the righthand side. I, their guest, sat at the head.

I took notes as people took turns telling stories about the system. The users went first. Richard (not his real name) was having a problem with some report he was running. I didn’t recognize the name of the report; it was some kind of accounting thing. Julie (not her real name) was having a problem with some other application feature whose name I might have half-recognized. Nancy, who joined by speakerphone, explained her problems with some other thing. And on it went. I wrote down all the things that the users had told me they were having problems with.

When the DBAs and system administrators talked, it was the users’ turn to only half-recognize the words in the conversation. I was much more comfortable in this part of the meeting, because now we were using words from my vocabulary—things like indexes and rollback segments and I/O. Of course, yes, I could certainly check all those things. I wrote them all down.

After an hour or so, it was meeting over, off to work. My host, a DBA, escorted me to the desk I’d be working at, showed me how to log in, and made sure I knew how to get in touch with everybody. I sat down and began my work.

Now, at this point in my career, the work I did for Oracle Financials sites was pretty much just the rote execution of a half dozen items on a list I had accumulated long before arriving. It almost didn’t matter what anybody said in the Monday meeting. I would always listen politely and take notes, but I already knew most of what I was going to be doing. Almost every Financials site I’d ever visited had the same problems over and over again. The design of the product virtually assured that people would make certain configuration mistakes. I knew what those mistakes were, and I knew how to fix them.

And so I worked Monday and Tuesday, and by Wednesday mid-morning, I was ready for feedback. I had completed my checklist of things that I had hoped would address all of the users’ concerns. I had looked at all the specific things that the technical people had asked me to look at. And I had written up my notes about what all I had done. Now it was time to hit the phone, to see how the users were doing.

First on my list was Richard, who had the slow report. “Hello, Richard, I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Cary, the consultant from Oracle who is here to make your system faster. I am calling to find out if your [blah-blah] report is running any faster. You had mentioned Monday morning that it was taking more than twenty minutes to run, and this was a problem.” Ah yes, the whatever-it-was report was running in less than five minutes now, and he was thrilled. I asked him if I could quote him on that in my report, and he consented. Excellent! One down, six to go.

My next call went exactly the same way: Julie was delighted, thank you; yes I could quote her in my report. I made a few other calls, and they all went the same way, just one dopamine hit after another. By the time I got to Nancy, I was pretty pleased with myself. A couple more of these calls, and I might be able to head home a day or two early.

But on the call with Nancy, I wasn’t getting the nice, love-you vibe that I had been getting on the other calls. I tried to get the affirmation: “But doesn’t the pop-up account code validation run a lot faster now, since I’ve been here?”

She said it does.

“Okay, then, can I quote you on that?”

“…Well, you can, but I don’t really care very much about that. What I care about is the [blah-blah] field of the [blah-blah] form.”

Oh man… She wasn’t happy yet, and I didn’t even understand the words she was using to describe why. But I did know what to do. Bob had taught me that a long time ago. So I asked her, “Well, do you mind if I come visit you, so that I can see exactly what you’re talking about?”

She said, well, I could…if I really wanted to, but…“Oh, of course, I’m happy to do it!” I told her.

“Well,” she said, “I’m not in the building you’re in. I’m a couple miles away.”

Not a problem, I told her. I had a rental car and could head over right away. So she gave me directions to her building and said she’d meet me at the security desk. I asked her to please tee up her problem in the application while I was driving so she could show me exactly what’s bothering her when I got there. She said she’d be ready.

So I packed up my briefcase and went outside to my car. I was a little nervous about what would happen when I got there. What if I put her through all this trouble and couldn’t figure out how to help? But I knew it would be fine in the end. By that time, I had learned that there’s no real shame in saying, “I don’t know, but I can help you find out.” She had a phone on her desk. I knew lots of people I could call if I needed a hand.

The drive didn’t take long. Nancy met me at security just like she’d promised. She signed me in, and we walked up the stairs to the second floor. On the way to her cube, she showed me the biggest Xerox machine that I had ever seen. She explained that this huge ten-yard-long printer/photocopier could take a floppy disk in its east end and then birth a bound book out its west end. We nodded hello to the mail guy who was pushing a cart down her hallway.

Seeing Nancy’s cube told a story that I never would have seen through the phone. On her wall hung a certificate of achievement declaring that Nancy could type over 100 words per minute. Attached to the right side of her DEC VT320 terminal was a plastic clipboard. She had two spikes with weighted bases (called spindles, I later learned—as in “do not fold, spindle, or mutilate”). One, on her desk to the right of her terminal, was labeled “IN.” Another one, on her desk to the left of her terminal, was labeled “OUT.”

I could envision her workflow. Papers would load up on her IN spike. (Carefully, I hope: those spindles look like a bloodbath waiting to happen.) She’d pull a page off the IN spike onto the clipboard and then type 100 words per minute for a little while. Then she’d move the page from the clipboard to the OUT spike. She’d probably repeat this until the IN spike was empty. Then she’d probably file everything on the OUT spike.

Everything looked optimized for speed. This was my first impression.

Then Nancy explained, “I pay bills. You saw the mail guy. He brings bills to me from the daily mail. The one bill that I dread the most is from Xerox. I just got one today. The huge copy machine I showed you just outside there? We pay Xerox every month for it. The reason I hate the Xerox bill is because I can never remember the vendor name that I have to call up in the application. I can never remember from one month to the next whether it’s just ‘Xerox’ or ‘Xerox Inc.’ or ‘Xerox Corporation’…here’s what I have to do to pay the Xerox bill.”

Then she turned around in her seat and put her hands on the keyboard. The Xerox bill was clipped into her clipboard. Her cursor was positioned in the vendor name field. She had teed up her problem, just like I had asked on the phone. Then she typed the characters \ Q R. The backslash dropped down an application menu, simulated with box-drawing characters, like ┌, ─, and ┐. The Q dropped down a query menu, and the R ran a “blind” (meaning unrestricted) query. Thus, \ Q R instructed the application to return every vendor name on the whole entire system. On the screen was the first page of the result of this query, containing about twenty vendor names all beginning with the letter A.

Then Nancy turned her face toward me and, with her righthand index finger, she started tapping the Next Screen key. She moved her lips quickly, “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight…” as she was doing it, and when she got to twenty-six she stopped. “Twenty-six times I have to hit the Next Screen key to get to where Xerox is listed.” Of course, she knew it was twenty-six only because she had just rehearsed it while I was driving over.

The application couldn’t keep up with Nancy’s Next Screen key presses. The screen would refresh in lunges. It would fill half the screen, pause for a second, and then fill-pause-fill-fill-pause. It would fill and pause like that for tens of seconds. It felt like forever.

Finally, after paging through the whole vendor name table, her screen showed the final few vendor names:

Walton Group
Wortmann AG
Xerox Corp
Xircom Inc
Xylog
Zimmermann’s Deli

She clicked the ↓ key a couple times, highlighting the row that said Xerox, and she said, “There you go.”

So, apparently it’s “Xerox Corp,” no period at the end.

She stood up politely, in case I wanted to take her seat, and crossed her arms. My heart was racing, because I knew this one, and it was going to be really easy to fix. I wasn’t going to need to sit down. I did need to choose my words carefully, though, because I didn’t want to sound disrespectful by blurting out something about how “easy” this was going to be, after it had been plaguing her for so long.

I smiled, and after what I hope seemed like only a second or two, I found the right words. “Nancy,” I said, “in about two minutes, I think you’re going to be really happy.” She smiled at that and invited me to tell her what I had in mind. I motioned for her to sit back down.

“Please go back to where you were when I first got here, back to the field where you type the vendor name.” A couple of backslash-this and backslash-thats, and she was back to the vendor name field. I asked her, “Now, please type x (the first letter of ‘Xerox’).” She did. “And now press Return.” And then boom. Instantly:

Xerox Corp
Xircom Inc
Xylog

She snapped around, hands to her cheeks. “Oh my gosh, are you kidding me?! Are you kidding me!” Big grins all around.

I told her that the application had this feature where if you type just the first few letters of a value you want to find and press Return, then the software automatically displays the results of a pattern match, using what you’ve typed as a prefix. She kept grinning and shaking her head. “I’m going to schedule a department meeting right away, because everybody on the whole floor is having the same kind of problem I was having.”

…Everybody on the whole floor.

We enjoyed the celebration for a couple more minutes. I asked if there was anything else, and she told me no that was it. She said she appreciated the other stuff I had fixed, too (she had noticed it), but this was the big one. It was why she had hated this new system.

…Hated this new system.