Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

Section III: Software Projects: the Good, the Bad and the Pitiful 173
people swearing like that in the office, but we really don't appreciate it in the
home' she laughed. My boss was most charming to her; it was a revelation, as it
was a side to his character I hadn't seen.
I hurriedly reset the identity fields to a higher number, and made the
routines more complex so that they couldn't come up with the commonest
offensive syllables. I didn't know many of them myself, despite having gone to
a boarding school, but a half hour in Dispatch gave me an encycopaedic
knowledge, which I then used to cleanse the routine.
The system soldiers on, cured of its propensities for bad language, and still
much appreciated by the users. The staff of Dispatch still talk of the strange guy
from IT who rushed around with a notebook, excitedly recording all their
foulest language. The incident has made me even more obsessional about
'nursing' my websites when they are newly launched because computer systems
can fail in unexpected ways.
Most of all, however, I am far more cautious of my own big ideas and less
eager to bully them through to implementation.