The boss

The bright summer day started well that morning. Scintillating, Aaron Leibtschik thought to himself on the drive to work in the Princeton industrial park – he could even hear the birds singing in the trees, driving by in his Z4 with the top down. Once inside the complex, Aaron went through his daily routine of coffee (black, no sugar), e-mail, checking the product build, the morning status report, and his daily write.

Marvin Pinkelman walked into the office and looked down at his feet. Aaron detected a whiff of Old Spice in his boss’s wake.

“We’ve got a customer-facing issue with Aircom Mexico,” Marvin said. “The requisitions page isn’t loading up in Spanish.”

So much for the scintillating day and the tweeting birds. Translations were his domain. “Did they configure it correctly?”

Aaron logged into the customer database and poked around, while Marvin stood there, tapping his feet, hands now on hips. “What’s taking so long?”

“I’m seeing something very odd here. Come look at this, Marvin. These entries in the log table … the Spanish translations are there, but for some reason, that column on the far right has the wrong value. Let me run a quick test on our Spanish server …”

After just a minute, Aaron saw something even more strange – the tests ran beautifully on their own server. And he checked the local database – all the columns had correct values.

Aaron sighed. “Looks like someone tampered with their database. We’ll have to look at their logs. Long story short, we can get a patch out to them in the next twenty –“

“Good morning, Melvin,” Marvin said. His own boss had walked down the hallway. “We’ve got a problem. The translations software isn’t working in Mexico.”

Aaron started to sputter. “That’s not what I said –“

“Just to let you know, I’m on top of it,” Marvin said. Melvin nodded his head and disappeared down the hallway.