No, not me.

On Tuesday, I had this bizarre conversation with this chyk in accounting. It seems that over there in accounting, I'm some kind of idol or something. This is so ironic from my point of view, because I'm not usually very aggressive in meetings, but, as it turns out, I've been very aggressive in all the meetings *she's* been in with me. See, for our DiffServe product, I'm doing the "data mediation". In this case, that means I'm counting the customers packets and summarizing it for accounting at the end of the month. There's a lot more involved, but that's what I talk to her about, and other parts of the company have made some astoundingly bad suggestions to me in said meetings and I jumped right up and told them why they were stupid. God help everyone when I really know I'm right. Luckily for the rest of you, that doesn't happen very often.

Anyway, I had explained to her why co-lo would be doing their billing differently than eClass. You know, the stuff about how web farms send small requests for big replies making their traffic unbalanced. Diff Serve is more of a transit product and since people are using it for VOIP, the traffic should be reasonably balanced blah blah blah. Then I said that I could whip up their billing script if she got to the point of doing it by hand, which she has apparently done before.

Really, all accountants should learn PERL (this is the proper spelling, but no one uses it. Phooey on all of you) in college. It would have changed my life back when I was doing other stuff.

I've drifted a bit here, but apparently they think I'm really cool. This always amazes me. They are, of course, intimidated by everyone in engineering. I'm starting to think that engineers do this on purpose just to keep the voice mail down.