Places you don't want to go

I've mentioned before about Ted E.'s unshakeable faith in the power of system-generated reports.

What I didn't mention was that I'm convinced that at some point in his life he's had either a profound religious experience in the presence of Crystal Reports.

Or perhaps a sexual one.

Either way, he once saw someone in this team use it and has continued to rhapsodize over it ever since. No-one's used it in the four years I've been here, so it obviously belongs back in the Golden Age when everything worked perfectly, no-one asked him awkward questions like "why?" (or, more appropriately, "WTF???"), and the staffing levels were bloated enough to mask a treasure trove of inefficiencies and psychopathic behaviour.

Of course, this was also the same Golden Age where the primary database had no reporting capability at all, and without a separate programme to extract information it was impossible to retreive any of the corrupt and mismatched data stored within it, but we'll overlook that for the moment.

What brought this to mind was his conversation this morning with one of the techs, in which he once again evangelised on the magic of Crystal and bemoaned the fact we once had it, still have an old copy licensed to us, and yet no-one ever uses it anymore. Quite what's preventing him from using it isn't clear (okay, it is; but let's pretend otherwise for the moment), but underpinning the whole sermon is the same burning faith that Crystal will magically pull Truth and Order from the Chaos at the simple push of a button.

No need for any kind of user input  or designing of reports in the first place, of course. That kind of talk is heresy. It's already an article of faith that anything that comes out of a report is inherently True; if it comes out of Crystal Reports, then it's practically divine revelation.

Or the best sexual experience he's ever had.