I was at the most ridiculous meeting today, in the conference room of one of Makati’s more prestigious medical centers. In attendance were: 2 senior-level managers, 2 systems administrators, 2 account managers, 1 technician and myself, the long-haired guy in rubber shoes.
The meeting was convened to unravel one particularly testy mystery, which I had been trying in vain to solve over the phone for the past few weeks, i.e., "What is the username and password for your website’s hosting account?"
No one in the room knew the answer.
A lot of hemming and hawing ensued, with both the client and the hosting provider lobbing progressively more cutting remarks at each other in an effort to pin the blame for the loss of this information. It became apparent to me, during the course of all this, that although the managers barely understood what the missing login was even going to be used for, their blame-assignment skills were top-notch, and eventually the folks from the hosting provider were overcome.
Finally, the hosting folks made a conference call to their own support hotline and asked one of the reps to talk to me directly. I repeated my question, while everyone in the room listened intently. The whole thing took about thirty seconds, and ended with the positively surreal phrase, "So let me just confirm that, our company account’s password is ‘12345′?"