Haha! OMG that reminds me of a "wtf" moment back when I was the lead file server admin.
I was working up a proposal to purchase a rather large amount of disk space. I had written a process to gather quota data from all the servers, collate them with time data using revision based checkouts (so, assuming proper revision control was used on the control files, we could grab a snapshot of allocated disk quotas at any arbitrary point in time across all our servers), and then construct a set of graphs showing monthly total quota allocation on all file servers over time. I then built a forecast model based on that historical growth pattern, projected for a given amount of time, and estimated how many disks/shelves/heads we'd need to cover predicted engineering data space needs. Honestly, the data collection side was the biggest pain. The prediction was pretty straightforward (data growth rates were quite consistent, in fact).
In any case, I go up to the purchasing person. I'm a bit nervous because this is the first time I've done this. Prior to this, if I needed something, I just said "I need X", and then off it goes into an approval system, and eventually X arrives. I'd never directly interacted with the money folks before. I had my charts in hand, all the data I'd used, and a nicely written justification. All ready to go. I hand this to the woman, and what happened next can only be described as surreal. I watched as she did "math", that basically consisted of taking the number I'd said I needed, then dividing it among the number of systems I had written down, then multiplying by some "factor", then taking a separate count of the systems, and dividing that by the same "factor" (I honestly have no clue what it was), and then multiplying those two numbers together to arrive at a final amount.
Um.... Which resulted in the exact same number I'd given her. Basically, all my projections and data didn't really matter at all. I may have fudged the details of the process she used (I'm reasonably sure I blanked it out of my mind to protect my sanity), but basically it mathematically resulted in whatever number she was given initially. At first I was tempted to point this out, but then I realized that would just be pure folly, so I accepted that I'd gotten what I wanted and walked out. I recall pointing this out to my boss, and he just kinda nodded and said something about "they really just care that you spent time generating a number". So the fact that I had some data, and pretty pretty charts and graphs, was sufficient. Didn't really matter what was on them.
Edited, Mar 2nd 2015 2:27pm by gbaji
____________________________
King Nobby wrote:
More words please