Un-freakin-believable

Some guys are dumb. It's a reality. I don't know who gets to be blamed for this - maybe God or their parents - but some people are dumb and can't do a thing about it.

Others are dumb by conscious choice. We have a pretty weird MQ Series environment where messages coming from a specific Alpha/VMS box must be partitioned and regrouped on the receiving end, as well as converted from EBCDIC to ASCII. Nothing that complex in the end.

Mr. Project Manager X wants to know why his messages arrive as complete and utter rubbish on the receiving end instead of nicely formatted ASCII like mine.

I tell him that the header he inserts in the message is in ASCII while the rest of the message is EBCDIC and no server in the world will convert a mixed ASCII/EBCDIC message into anything readable.

Mr. PM X is sure that is not the problem. The problem must be the message regrouping routine that is not working as it should.

I insist that I've been there and done that 7 months ago and the real reason was that the messages were not sent in one character set only. Somehow someone screwed up big time writing the header (as I said: been there, done that).

No, he's still sure it's something else.

I'm now running the "type" command on some dirty JPEGs into a text file and will send him that as the output of the MQ messages (note: MQ sees EBCDIC on an ASCII environment as BINARY data except if it's converted correctly). Then, when he calls claiming he can't open the files I'll ask him to save the file as a .jpg and give it a try again.

I love clueless Project Managers...