(no subject)

Just my spin on the Kerry/Edwards ticket- something akin to Eeyore/Tigger 2004. Click on the image for a version 25% larger, which prints nicely in landscape mode at roughly 4"x11" if anyone felt compelled to, oh, print it out and put it in their car window.

(no subject)

On Friday, one of the product groups here reported an urgent problem to our triage group, which needed a quick fix.
The problem boiled down to "the city one of our properties is in isn't showing up in the dropdown menu where people are supposed to be able to search by city."

The issues reported to triage come into the mailboxes of my group, and generally we determine what the problems are and write bugs to get prioritized as appropriate. Often we need to exchange e-mail with the various folk who are reporting problems to determine exactly what the problems are. Such was the case here- I sent mail back to the original requestor and the other people she'd cc'd on the mail, trying to determine a) if the city needed to be added to the dropdown because there was an existing property there or b) if it needed to be added because they were planning to add a new property which didn't exist already. If the latter were the case, it wasn't going to show up, because the searches are designed so that they shouldn't return any null results; if the former, knowing what property it was was going to help me figure out exactly which of eight possible tables in the database the information was drawn.

So, the original person responded with the name of the place, and a little digging around showed that whomever had done the original data entry on it hadn't filled out all the appropriate elements of the profile- and had left out the relevant one which would cause this to populate. So i fixed it. About five minutes afterward, i got a response to my inquiry about what the property there was that read in part as follows:

Maybe its me, but why in the world would we ask for a city to added to the list if we didn’t have a hotel there?

What’s up with that?

This prompted a polite but annoyed response from me:

The question was not "Are we just entering this city on a whim" but "Tell me what supplier is there so that I can check the profile data we have on them." As it turned out, the profile tree Continent/Country/City for [property name redacted] did not have this filled out reflecting [information redacted], which probably would have prevented it from ever turning up in the City dropdown on the search. Having fixed this may well resolve the problem, but our developers will ensure that the list populates with the city as expediently as possible if other amendations are required.

I hope this answers your question sufficiently.

Looking at it today, sure enough, having the proper profile information makes it work properly. *feigns shocked surprise*
So i sent back to the folks on the e-mail thread this information, and added:

In the future, checking with the product entry team to verify that the correct elements are in the profile as entered should come before sending requests to triage- this wasn't a problem with the website code, but in the way the product was entered.

Still, the Technology department is happy to report a successful resolution to the problem.

Amazing how things will return the proper results if you give them the right data to start with. I just hope the stupid bint who got snippy with me is somehow responsible for ensuring that the relevant profile information is filled out correctly.