Travelled in to London the other day to visit the esteemed boss of ITProportal (*prone* I am not worthy etc). As I pitched up at the railway station I was greeted by a sign in the ticket office that read “We are not selling tickets here”.
OK I thought, I wonder why.
The chap behind the counter, who I cheerfully chat to on my ticket buying ventures, explained that the ticket system was down and that the only way to buy a ticket was from the machine opposite.
As he said this he turned the monitor of the PC around and showed me the SQL Server 2000 Application Event Log and configuration tools all up on the screen which he had accessed to “see if he could fix the problem”.
I was impressed. Not only does my local train operator teach its staff how to sell tickets, they also learn to become SQL Server DBAs!
Or maybe, on the other hand, what I saw was a huge whole in their security and desktop lockdown that enables staff to “try and fix problems” such as database configuration errors.
I didn’t have the heart to stay any longer, let alone tell the bloke I have written three books on SQL Server and could probably sort it out. Instead I choose to politely move on and do battle with the ticket machine, which promptly short chained me by 90p and then the train doors failed to open, but that is another story.
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