Two guys with a mute button

There's never a day that goes by without finding something to laugh at. It's often a buddy of mine that provides all the entertainment at the office. Today was a great example.

We were on a conference call with two vendors in California. We are working on a joint project and they wanted us to provide some data to them. In fact, they want ALL our HR data. This is lunacy as anyone with a half a brain will deduce, if you consider the size of this Enterprise of ours. My buddy (I'll call him "Jerry") says to the seven people on the other end of the phone line:

"My concern here is the size of our systems. I mean, we have literally 50 different systems of HR data. Some of our data is here, some of it is external. It's big, it's huge."

"Yeah we know" was the reply "but we've done this before."

Well, if that were really true, they wouldn't be asking for all our data! They'd know how ridiculous this request is.

"Oh I'm sure you have, and we want to give you what you folks need." Jerry was saying to pacify them. "But we are talking millions and millions of rows of data here. We have data going back to 1986. It's never been deleted. This is not something that will just fit on a CD and sent along through the mail."

Jerry puts the phone on mute and looks at me and says: "Am I being ugly here? Am I being an idiot? Tell me and I'll shut up."

"No, no." I tell him. "They've got to be able to narrow it down better than that. Otherwise we'd need a semi truck full of CDs."

Jerry un-mutes the phone and we hear the others talking over each other trying to figure it out. One guy, the brilliant one, says:

"I'm really happy about all your data."

Jerry mutes the phone: "He likes our data! I'm so happy he likes it." He un-mutes the phone while I start to giggle.

The guy continues: "We do understand that your data is deep as well as wide. It sounds to be voluminous."

Jerry puts the phone back on mute while we begin to loose it. This guy said nothing but just repeated what we told him, and I'm not even sure he said that much. Just as soon as the phone is muted, Jerry mimics him like a good Saturday Night satire: "Well, yes, the data is deep as well as wide."

Then I retort: "It would be voluminous."

And then we just laugh and laugh.

We are having way too much fun.

...dave
I'm not a complete idiot, some parts are missing!