Garbage In, Garbage Out

Its fine this morning, so I cycle to work although still with wet feet as my cycling shoes still haven’t dried out from Thursday’s downpour.

At work we have a computer program that calculates the straight line distance between two points using their grid references, it then works out an appropriate charge for the haulage company that is undertaking the journey. It’s a pretty simple program and an old one, that’s been working happily for years. One customer though refuses to believe that the journey he has entered into the program is thirty miles, he says it should be nine miles. This demonstrates the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ theory. Having checked the data he is entering, it is pretty obvious to me that whereas his start point is on the Hampshire coast their finish point is about 18 miles off the coast of the Isle Of Wight in the middle of the Portsmouth-Le Harve ferry route, in the English Channel.

I’ve tried my best to convince the customer of this, even sending him links to various online mapping programs but to no avail. He’s right he says, I’m wrong and can I just ‘fix’ the program. Err, no. Suppose it’ll be my fault too if they drown a few truckers, who aren’t the brightest of sparks. ‘I was only following your instructions Guv, glug glug’, oh and watch out for those ferries.

There are black clouds overhead as I prepare to cycle home. Here we go again. I just know it's waiting for me to leave before it starts to rain. It also looks like tennis is going to be off again.

It actually stays fine until I get home, then it chucks it down. So no tennis but at least the dogs are thrilled because they get to go on the park.