Years ago I worked in an Oracle® shop as Oracle Applications™ internal support for a small (but still “global”) manufacturer in California as one of the junior HelpDesk folks. While Oracle itself is a pretty stable and reliable database, we were having a lot of trouble with the Applications™ (business applications) and customizations that had been added for the benefit of this manufacturer and its systems. It would crash from time to time for reasons that were not always very well understood, and usually unpredictable. For that reason and others we had a service agreement with the other divisions of the manufacturer that we (as support staff) would provide round-the-clock support. When it crashed, then we would be on call to restart the system within moments, but it was still a huge inconvenience to whoever was working with the program.
Still, that wasn’t enough to satisfy some of the Management team.
Late one quarter the VP of Finance came down to our area to discuss Oracle’s reliability during the close of the current quarter – which was also the close to the fiscal year. They had a serious heart-to-heart – in the open office and in front of us peons – and the VP of Finance said, seriously and deadpan, that he wanted “to assure that there won’t be any unscheduled outages of Oracle” while the quarter closing was in progress. In other words: Don’t let Oracle crash while we’re closing this quarter’s books.
I burst out laughing. How could I not think this was a joke? My own VP looked at me as if to say, “I know. I KNOW! It’s a ridiculous request: Make sure there are no accidents. But go along with it.” The VP of Finance… well, you can’t explain how silly that request is to someone stupid enough to make it, so we just let him go on thinking that I was inappropriately insane.