The dinner
Last weekend I was invited to a family dinner at the village of Moià, at the north-east of Spain, right in the center of Catalunya. It's a lovely place and we spent the day grilling, eating and chatting (you know we Spaniards like eating and chatting very much, huh?). Well, my elder nephew is going to the Århus University to develop his computing studies. He wants to buy a laptop in order to take notes, develop research articles and so on.
The question
"I'm thinking about buying an XXX with AAA technology and ZZZ Gb of RAM, but I'm comparing it with a YYY with a BBB processor...", he started asking. "Hey Alvaro, so you know about computing, don't you? What's the best one for me?". "Well... er... yes...", I managed to mumble, "that depends on what use you've got to make from your laptop". Fortunately my partner rescued me from this situation, and advised my nephew very precisely.
This reminded me of a well-known joke among Spanish IT graders:
Pause -- The joke
One mate asks his friend, which is an IT worker:"Hey, you know about programming, don't you?""Well... yes""Then help me program the video recorder""..." (stunned)(I've never been good at telling jokes... sorry)Now back to work
Shortly speaking, SAP is HUUUUGE. It covers so much functionality that it's (almost) impossible to find someone who's expert in every single area. That's why SAP is sliced into modules and applications and satellites. Personally, I've been working in financial modules for 12 years now, and I'm always open-minded to learn from other areas, such logistics or human resources. That's the way I am. Nevertheless, we cannot know (or even pretend to know) about everything.But when you are at the first line of fire, constantly receiving mails and phone calls and visits of users that report program bugs, or enhancement requests, or even when they ask you to run a report that you explained them 1 month ago... Or when you just draw up manuals for using the application, and after a year you discover that they haven't read a single word of it...Users always have to rely on some "IT guru" that solves any problem they have with their PCs. And I say any... The problem is that I'm not such guru, just a humble SAP consultant. And then... how can you answer questions like "How do I use function VLOOKUP?" or "My email inbox is full, what should I do now?".Disclaimer
It's been a difficult week... so... Sorry for the hassling...
