This is part 3 retelling the end of CDFW's battles with his company's network demons. You can read about CDFW's travails in the CDFW arcs. Part 1 began this CDFW recounting his experiences with various routers and we learned in Part 2 that CDFW would rather work with routers than Microsoft Word...
"I only browsed a few pages of the manual. It's clear they started this router operating system a long time ago, and just added on stuff when they were confronted with new and scary technology such as, say, token ring. By now, the guys who wrote the first few modules are probably dead, and nobody knows how those modules work, why they're there, or what they're supposed to do. But we better not drop them. It might put a curse on us.
"But at heart, no matter how many extra features they've got, most routers are only expected to do three or four things. And all of them have to have the same information to do those three or four things. So once you've set up a couple of them, it's no big deal to tackle a new one. You know what needs to be set, you know what they're most likely to call it, you just have to figure out where they hide it.
"Well, that's what I thought, anyway. That's been my experience. It was my experience with these new routers. I could see where all the settings were. I could see they were either set correctly or they weren't being used. It was only a bit more complicated than my old router. No big mystery other than why it wasn't working."
More to follow...
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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