mr. gauge man.

Part of being in charge of a project is dealing with people who are involved in the same project, but who work outside my office. I'm writing software for a new prototype vehicle and I've had to talk to a different person for pretty much every part of the truck. There's the tire guy, the suspension guy, the brakes guy, etc. I guess when all these guys write in their blogs, they complain about the software girl.

Today, I talked to the gauge guy. The creators of this vehicle thought it might be beneficial for the driver to know how fast the vehicle is moving at any point, so they decided a speedometer might be appropriate. There are also five other gauges. The gauge guy sent me a set of these gauges so that I could test my software on them.

They didn't work.

I raised the flag, after much double and triple checking. We sent the gauges back and received new ones that had been newly programmed to work the way they should. I plugged them in yesterday to do some more testing. All of them responded nicely to the messages I was sending them, except for the voltage gauge.

It didn't work.

I raised another flag, which raised a flurry of emails asking questions about what I had tried and how the gauge should work in the first place. I limited my responses to plain english, because I've found that I've had to deal with a lot of non-technical people, and if I started going into too much detail, they would just get confused. This morning, I received my first ever communication from the gauge guy, who copied and pasted a chart from our own document about how I should be constructing the message to send to the voltmeter, asking "Does this help?" He might as well have sent an email that said only, "Are you sure you're not a moron?"

I was a bit insulted at the email. After all, all it said was the message that I was supposed to be sending to the gauge and how it was constructed. Thanks, I know. Throughout the course of this project, I have felt more than a little doubt that I am experienced enough to be running this project. I am young and green behind the ears and were our company not experiencing a staff shortage, I would not even be in this position. I would not be surprised if any error in the communication between the gauges and my application were on my side. I know, I know: I am a newbie.

But he doesn't know that.

Needless to say, it was very difficult to not reply sarcastically. What I did reply was a friendly and humble email, sending him the details of my message in base-16 numbers, asking him to check it and make double-sure for me. I decided if he wanted to get technical, then I could do that.

What I wanted to say was this:

Dear Mr. Gauge Man,

I just wanted to thank you for your very helpful email on the matter of the voltmeter. Please, praytell, where did you get this information? If only we had such charts detailing every message that truck components communicate, our program might not just sit there like a stalemate game of solitaire. We do have pretty graphics, though.

I feel so foolish to find out that I had been going along communicating with the voltmeter incorrectly all along. I had tried a number of things: I had sent it extensive text documents, I had tried tapping the value on its case, I even tried standing quite near to it and shouting "26 volts, please!" in case it was hard of hearing.

Now I feel ready to procede upon the appropriate course of action. Thank goodness for your email! I can only imagine that there are others like me who wish to communicate with their voltmeters, yet do not know the way. Perhaps you should look into a career in consulting.

Sincerely,
Miss Software Girl

Mr. Gauge Man did reply to the message I actually did send him. He said that there was an error in the gauge programming, that it was programmed to look for a different message. If only he'd read his little chart, we could have avoided all this trouble.