9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

My company was purchased in April of 2005 roughly, and our new parent company wished to exchange Global Address Lists with us. (Global Address Lists, GALs, are a company directories accessible in your email client.)

No big deal, right? We had been doing it for years with our previous parent company. And thanks to a fellow partner-in-crime from a sister IT department, it was relatively easy. Click, click, done.

Some backstory might help here… our new parent company outsources all of their IT to a couple different companies.

We give them our GAL, they give us theirs, and I import it, no problem. (Keep in mind it took months to just get it from them, no joke.) We agree that we should do this at least every quarter, perhaps even once a month.

They don’t import ours. And they don’t send us updates.

Flash forward a year. People are complaining that ours is out-of-date and that it is completely missing on the parent company side. I contact them again, exchange GAL files again, and again, it took like a month to get it.

Then I talk to the admin on their side. He has no clue how to import it easily. I say no problem… here are the steps I take, here is the source code that makes the deltas between the old stuff and the new stuff, here is the commands we use to export and import the info. I made it super easy.

I don’t know if they import ours or not. I update our side. Again we agree that it should happen once a quarter or once a month.

Flash forward another year. No updates from them, and they STILL haven’t imported ours. The CEO of their company gets on them and I get a phone call asking how to do it. I send the same info I sent before… the steps, the commands and the source code.

I import theirs again.

This week I get an email from their admin.

Guess what he was asking me?

How to do it easily. He didn’t want to “reinvent the wheel” (his words). He didn’t want to dig through the source code – I looked at it, and even I, not a programmer in the least, can read it and understand it easily. I don’t get it.

Have they imported ours yet?

Nope still working on that from APRIL.

Takes me 20 minutes. Takes them 6 months?

WTF?