Now CDFW is on the field of battle.
"By 8:30, he was asking for suggestions from me for incantations. He had pulled the new router I bought and replaced it with one he'd brought (which was essentially identical to my old router) and triumphantly explained why that one wouldn't work and we'd have to go with the new one I bought. It worked fine, since I'd configured it successfully already. But he couldn't ping it from his own router. Since he'd asked me for incantations, I suggested perhaps it didn't matter that he couldn't ping it from his new router. He insisted that there could be no internet access without that. All told, he spent about an hour trying to solve this problem. Finally, I called the new office and asked someone to go online. Sure enough they could get to the web. It did not soothe his soul, however, as he knew it must be cached pages. So I drove over to the new offices and tried it myself, going to pages I had built myself that I knew couldn't be cached. That finally convinced him, so he followed me over.
"He exhorted me, again, to change to his way of doing certain things, and I said, "Fine, and we'll do that right now just to get through for this one person and get everybody else later." And he said, well, heck I'll show you I can do it right now and that will fix it. And he did it. And it didn't. And our accountant and affable practitioner of THAT dark art, was standing there. I'd already explained to him the normal way of dealing with network sorcerers and how it usually works. It was lovely to have a witness to see I wasn't just making this stuff up."
The next installment is the end of this arc and where CDFW summarizes his experiences and learnings.
I'll be speaking at the San Francisco April '07 Emetrics Summit on Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing on May 7, 2007. Come on by and say hello.
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