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Rapid Blame Assignment

By

Old Tom

OT Scripts

There's a humorous software concept that I developed many years ago. The principle applies to this or any other business; use it to your advantage! But first, let me explain the story from the beginning.

Many years ago, when a certain aircraft company installed their first supercomputer, I worked onsite as the supercomputer software rep. That is, I was an employee of the supercomputer company, but worked onsite with the aircraft company people.

This particular group of people made a lot of changes to the computer's operating system. Everything was touched; everything had some form of local change in the software. Of course when the computer crashed - which was often - it was my responsibility.

That computer's time was being rented out at $10,000 per hour. Computer downtime was significant - obviously, far more significant than little ole me.

Stuff happened; the computer crashed. That is, it crashed often enough that Bill Gates would have been proud. Microsoft headquarters was a few rooms of office space a few miles down the road. This was before MS-DOS existed - so we can't even blame Microsoft for the idea of rebooting every day lest something happen!

When the computer crashed, the first question to be answered, was why did it crash. The aircraft people wanted to know if it was going to keep crashing. Crashing four times a day for the same reason just doesn't look too good. Do you want to be the one to give a refund on a ten million dollar supercomputer? Me neither.

Okay, so the computer crashes. Nobody has any idea why. If it crashed once, it's likely to crash again, unless the cause is fixed. But... who's going to fix it? Somebody had better be looking at the problem. Ten thousand dollars an hour says so. Ten million dollars asking for a refund says so.

Remember, the aircraft company made a lot changes to the operating system. Whose software was at fault? Nobody wanted to waste their time fixing the other person's problem.

Furthermore, nobody wanted the public humiliation of blaming the other company, only to be later proven wrong. These guys were finger-pointing experts.

Thus we invented the concept of Rapid Blame Assignment. We allowed the computer to stay down, on its back quivering with its legs in the air, while we figured out why. Once we knew whose fault it was, everybody was happy. One company could quiver in wrath, while the other could crawl with excuses.

Naturally, then, Rapid Blame Assignment had to be accurate. Heaven help us if the wrong side gets blamed! And, thus, we developed the second important concept: Plausible Deniability. Plausible Deniability is the ability to demonstrate that it could not possibly have been your fault. Ideally, it's the other guy who provides the proof.

How did we create Plausible Deniability? We added "features" to the software. They didn't make anything better or faster. What they did, was assist with the Rapid Blame Assignment phase. They helped us more quickly and accurately identify who was at fault.

You might guess from this little story that we were selfish, self serving, and tired of getting blamed for other peoples' problems. Well... let's put it this way. Would you want to be the one who gets in trouble every time Windows crashes, regardless of whose fault it was?

On the contrary, we were quite the opposite. You see, we went to great effort to save the other guys from humiliating themselves in public. We made it possible to figure out all by themselves, that the problem was their own darn fault. They no longer required us to point that out. This, then, was the third and final stage of our "invention." That is, the Prevention of Public Humiliation.

What brings this story to mind, is a conversation I had today. You see, the AVS Advantagizer provides too much information as it builds sites for you. It tells you precisely what it's doing. It names each picture it's using, and tells you where it puts it. It says which template it's working from, and where the resulting page is.

The question I received was, Why not just be quiet and get the job done?

Rapid blame assignment. If all is well, yes, the Advantagizer might as well be quiet about it. But what if all is not well? If you know it always but always tells you what it's doing... if the report looks wrong, you immediately know something is screwed up.

Have you ever screwed something up, and had the linksite owner or tgp owner get sarcastic on you? Have you had an AVS reviewer decline the site because something is wrong, and you go back to them to swear up and down nothing is wrong, so that they can firmly show you what is wrong?

That's why I consider Public Humiliation Prevention an important feature of all adult webmaster software. No software will ever be foolproof (Pastaboy can explain why), but if it can prevent just one incident of Public Humiliation, I think it's worth it.

Old Tom