Smokey, unfettered by theories about the impossibility of being able to lick between his shoulder blades, and not having read the instructions, promptly licked it off and started to foam at the mouth. Obviously not liking the taste. (Although we now discover upon investigation that it is alcohol in the dip that made him foam. Maybe he liked the taste too much).
Alf grabbed him, and luckily knowing about the Right Way to Hold Cats ("Very, very firmly"), washed out his mouth in the sink. After recovering from the indignity of all this, Smokey is now fine.
Which left me to mull over the dangers and general futility of making assumptions.
Now that they have got used to me, the Plovers no longer screech loudly and fly away when they see me. There appear to be two sorts. One lot have red legs and read beaks with black tips, and circular black and white rings on their heads as if they were wearing "Chilly Willy" hats. These are Crowned Plovers, I am told.
The other lot have yellow legs and yellow beaks with black tips, and a little white spot on their foreheads. These are Blacksmith Plovers because they make a "Tink" sound.
The Red Legs have staked out a territory on the South side of the cottage, near the Sheep. Yellow legs hang out around the Weeping Willow at the bottom of the plot.
I heard a couple of horror stories this week. Two years ago some of my clients cancelled their maintenance contracts because the software was stable and giving no problems. It now appears that they also cancelled their hardware and air conditioning maintenance to save money, because the costs of additional contractors needed to install their new German based application system had gone over budget and deadlines.
I suppose I could have played hard ball and asked for a maintenance contract, but hey, these guys were my customers for fifteen years. Old habits die hard, so I helped them out. I can afford to give huge corporations freebies when they run out of budget.
But in the process of fixing the various problems a horrific picture of neglect and sloppiness emerged. Now understand, these systems are old fashioned steam generating Big Mippers which demand clean power and air conditioning. Ignore those requirements at your peril.
And even more important, these are the systems which are actually carrying the load and running the business. While a cast of thousands attempts to "convert" and "cutover" to the new system. Already two years late. And the planned cutover has just been deferred from January 1998 to June 1998.
I was horrified to overhear the temporary operator at one site saying to the telephone "Sorry I can't give you a password to log in to the system, the guys who did that have all left".
One of these Dinosaurs was having powerouts as often as twice a day. These things run on chilled water and take an hour and a half to power up. In the basement beneath it is a Diesel Generator and Battery stack that would light a medium sized city. It transpires that the apprentice assigned to maintain this beast "borrowed" the injector pump for one of the delivery trucks and never bothered to replace it. Result, no UPS. Hundreds of thousands of bucks wasted.
All I could do was write scathing incident reports for Management consumption. I knew as I wrote them that I was wasting my time and effort.
If people are going to be blatantly dumb like this, we might as well forget about Y2k campaigning, they will shoot themselves in the foot and die on their own with no external factors required.
There is this strange perception that it is easy to replace the power of a Mainframe with LAN based products. But is difficult to persuade people that there are major functional differences between a Mack Truck and a Lamborghini.
Without going into long technical diatribe about the differences in performance of Channel based versus Bus Machines, Queuing Theory, and differences between parallel devices measured in Kilobytes and serial devices measured in Kilobits, in a nutshell, Mainframes process huge volumes of "dull" information, Modern machines process smaller volumes of "pretty" information.
Business needs Transaction based processing. Simple data, verified for accuracy, in huge volume, from multiple simultaneous sources, in real time, twenty four hours a day, with rock solid reliability.
Unfortunately, the Client/Server model still has not achieved comparable throughput, despite all our best efforts. Now we can throw fibre optics and MultiMegabit devices into the melting pot. But they do not solve our basic problems and are not yet widely used.
Only recently was a system tested to truly access a one terabyte database. With two DEC Alphas back to back and some very upmarket disks and controllers. Not something you buy at the local computer shop.
The concept of Volume Testing and transaction size is unknown to "modern" SE's. It is not their fault, they just do not get taught it. Amongst the many things I do, I have been spending my pennies on MCSE books and CDs. Not because I want the qualification, I am not in that market, but because I have been an Educator for many years and I am also an inveterate Nosey Parker.
They are very good in their way, but incredibly limited in their scope. As a result we have raised a generation of Technicians with huge gaping holes in their mental technical toolbox. Sadly, there is no "silver bullet" or quick fix for this.
Upgrade Now, cry the Manufacturers.