"ON THE VERANDAH - ART IN METAL"
Sep. 7th, 2006 06:36 pmSo currently I am working at the New Jersey Decorating Exchange where I am busy updating their big database of decorating-stuff manufacturers. (Thence comes my previous complaint about Chinese mailing addresses.) I do this through a website that they've set up. And so I'm going along today, working as normal, when, on returning to the "Edit Manufacturer" dropdown list, I notice that every single manufacturer in the database has spontaneously changed its name to "ON THE VERANDAH - ART IN METAL".
So I get Dave, my boss, and, laughing, tell him to come take a look at this. Now the thing is that we don't actually have a copy of all this stuff on the local machines, and in fact so far as I know we can't work with it except through the website. So Dave, after some curisng, calls up the people who *do* have it (and who just totally screwed it up), and ask what they can do.
Well, they have a backup. Problem is it was made one week ago.
I only started a week and a day ago. Reverting to what we had a week ago would be reverting basically the entire thing. Well, they go ahead and do it, as a temporary solution.
Now the thing is, all the other information about the manufacturers is intact - just the names are all wrong. And eventually Dave and I realize that means everything's OK, because there's an entire redundant name field that we could retrieve the names from. Or rather, everything's OK, *assuming* they didn't just get rid of the messed-up database when they restored the backup. He calls them up to point this out to them. We wait. Nothing happens. What are they doing? Dave complains that he could fix this in 2 minutes in Microsoft Access if he could access the database directly. Presumably, they threw the messed-up database out...
Finally, they find that they actually have another backup somewhere that was made last night, so I'll only have to do over what I did today, and we go with that. But gah!
-Harry
So I get Dave, my boss, and, laughing, tell him to come take a look at this. Now the thing is that we don't actually have a copy of all this stuff on the local machines, and in fact so far as I know we can't work with it except through the website. So Dave, after some curisng, calls up the people who *do* have it (and who just totally screwed it up), and ask what they can do.
Well, they have a backup. Problem is it was made one week ago.
I only started a week and a day ago. Reverting to what we had a week ago would be reverting basically the entire thing. Well, they go ahead and do it, as a temporary solution.
Now the thing is, all the other information about the manufacturers is intact - just the names are all wrong. And eventually Dave and I realize that means everything's OK, because there's an entire redundant name field that we could retrieve the names from. Or rather, everything's OK, *assuming* they didn't just get rid of the messed-up database when they restored the backup. He calls them up to point this out to them. We wait. Nothing happens. What are they doing? Dave complains that he could fix this in 2 minutes in Microsoft Access if he could access the database directly. Presumably, they threw the messed-up database out...
Finally, they find that they actually have another backup somewhere that was made last night, so I'll only have to do over what I did today, and we go with that. But gah!
-Harry
