Toilet roll

 

Image from Pixabay

After two years we are slowly returning to the office. There, a change has taken place that you never saw coming. New toilet roll holders were installed.

For readers without an office: such a holder is not the simple thing you’ll find in our homes, but a closed box with a slot at the front bottom. In the box there are two rolls on top of each other and the paper comes out through the slot. Well, that’s how it’s meant to be. And that's exactly what goes wrong with these new things. The rolls suffer too much friction. If you pull on the paper, it will tear - inside the holder. Which means you have to search for the beginning every time by sticking your finger into the holder and twisting the roll around – often several times – until you get hold of the end of the paper. And then pull carefully, because before you know it it will tear off again. Sometimes you get hold of the ends of both rolls and then you experience the luxury of double-layer toilet paper.

There is a manufacturer that makes these things. Not just out of the blue, but according to a design. They first make one, or a handful: the prototypes. They are tested, a few teething troubles come to light, the design is adjusted, there is a new prototype and eventually (after maybe a few more iterations) the holder is ready for production.

What went so wrong with this product? Did they only test under lab conditions? Has anyone come up with the idea to screw a prototype to the wall, put two rolls of toilet paper in it, sit on the pot and use paper according to some European standard or according to need? In short, didn’t they perform a field test?

But things also went wrong on our side. It must have been a government-wide tender. In such a tender, it is decided which offer, meeting the business requirements, offers the cheapest solution. Perhaps the buyers forgot to include a requirement that the paper should come out smoothly. And I wonder how the acceptance test was done.

Years ago we purchased a software package to manage our information security management system (ISMS) . It seemed like a great product and we went on a course with the manufacturer with a few people. We saw a product with a clear structure and we were able to carry out all the practice assignments smoothly. And then we had to implement the product in our organization. We were unable to reconcile our layout with that of the product. At that time I even reverse-engineered the data model of the product*, in other words: I drew out how the product was put together. We then tried to plot our organization and our working methods on this. We called in the manufacturer a few times and after each consultation we thought we understood how to do it. In the end we gave up and to this day we work with the old, trusted spreadsheets.

There is nothing wrong with that, by the way. At a conference, a speaker once asked the audience who was using Excel for this sort of thing. Numerous hands went up and there was a lot of laughter. At the same time, a sense of relief rippled through the room, because it suddenly became clear that it was not at all unusual to work in this way. Sometimes you simply have functional needs that you cannot express well in requirements and for which you cannot start a purchasing process for that reason. You then go tinkering yourself or you borrow something from another organization. In terms of management, this is a nightmare: if such a self-made tool becomes established and its maker is no longer available, then you have a problem.

I've put something like this together myself. And so as not to leave my colleagues in a bind in case of mishap strikes me, I made a technical manual for it, which describes exactly how things work under the hood of my spreadsheet. Whether it will be of any use to them, remains to be seen. Of course we are way too busy to test something like this. Besides, nobody knows where the manual is. So there’s room for improvement. How about you? Is the continuity of your team's important resources guaranteed?

*) Reverse engineering involves looking at how something works and deducing from that how it was designed.

 This blog post has been translated from Dutch to English by Google and edited by the author.

 And in the big bad world…

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English. 

• This article offers a rare insight into the negotiations between Mediamarkt and the criminals who took the chain's systems hostage. [IN DUTCH]
• ransomware takes very little time to encrypt many files. [IN DUTCH]
• LAPSUS$ extortion group recruits employees of large companies to get access to the company network.
• a teenager may be the LAPSUS$ mastermind.
• the London police have rounded up (part of) this hacker gang. [IN DUTCH]
• The FBI estimates the damage from cybercrime at more than $6.9 billion.
• you should encourage your kids (and yourself if necessary) to adjust a few settings in TikTok.
• President Biden calls on US companies to protect themselves against Russian cyber attacks.
• British soldiers are no longer allowed to use WhatsApp, for fear of Russian hackers.
• the NCSC in the Netherlands deems it possible that the Dutch digital resilience will be put to the test as a result of the war in Ukraine. [IN DUTCH]
• banks are often lenient if customers have been defrauded through phishing, but there are limits. [IN DUTCH]
• Fortunately, not everyone falls for the tricks of criminals. [IN DUTCH]
• British NCSC helps programmers with a toolkit to program safely.