Brother Dave

One of the great classic commercials was set in a Medieval monastery. A monk laboriosly caliagraphs a manuscript, then takes it to the Abbot for review.

“Very good, Brother Dominic,” the Abbot says, slowly reviewing the pages. “Very good.” The Abbot gathers the manuscript together, and hands it back to the beaming monk. “Now, I’d like … 200 more.”

Brother Dominic’s expression is just about what you’d expect.

So I’ve been slowly getting some feedback and input and assignments. The Big Boss has been sending me terse but supportive attaboys. The Mr. Consultant Man has been feeding me things to do, then sending back glowing responses, each time with an Abbot-like, “So now take a stab at …” Such as this assignment to design the Document Repository of the Future:

Now how about taking a shot at a requirements document for the environment we dicussed… Assume base Products of [high end database portal] and [mystery product I’ve just heard mentioned by name]…also assume it would be a distributed environment where by adding additional capacity should be as easy as plugging it in…Nodes should find each other and reconcile docs…Also assume that a document naming scheme would be based on allowing documents to “self-route” to the appropriate repository..

Use both sides of the paper if necessary.

I have no idea if the intent that this be a six month project, or a two day white paper. And, yes, I suppose I should find out. I guess it’s encouraging that this is thought to be within my abilities (and responsibility), unless it’s a setup for failure, but it still seems a bit on the vague side for my own liking.

The beat goes on.