Large Fierce Mammal

As many of your know by now, and those that don’t will in a moment, I have been a security consultant for 37 years. 35 with the LFM family firm Whynacht Security Solutions.

As with most successful businesses, the schedule is demanding and can get unruly if you don’t keep your saddle cinched tight and don’t spare the spurs! Even then, an outfit that’s been solving other peoples’ problems for more than three and a half decades can find itself fielding the curviest of curve balls.

Our business model is tried and tested, as you might expect after all these years, and generally pretty bulletproof against surprises because, like any good bar stool, it’s built on these Three Legs of Reality:

1. Murphy’s Law — “If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible time”;
2. Speaking your plans aloud is the best way to hear the Gods laugh; and
3. No good deed goes unpunished.

Naturally there are other influences that one must be ready to accommodate — the fact that, as the saying goes, “You will generally find that the enemy has two courses of action open to him, and of these he will choose the third,” and that anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice, to name a few — and these one must be ever ready to navigate as swells upon the sea, but they are not absolutes like the Big Three.

All to the good, because back at the turn of the year we launched a new invoicing system here at HQ that as of yesterday was well on the way to automating the process of issuing recurring billings and statements to clients carrying an open balance past the end of a month. Heretofore, for clients set up for electronic delivery, we have created the invoice or statement as a pdf and then attached it to an email for sending. Considering the volume of invoices that go out of here in a year, automating as much of that process as possible will save a lot of time … when it works.

So yesterday, the (obviously unspoken, see 2 above) plan was to get this all set up and working in time for 1 May 2018. The first step required migrating the full archive of client service records, including all previously issued invoices, from the old invoicing system to the new. The records for a mere 50-ish of our clients had only partially migrated when things went sideways.

You see, invoices archived for service records represent a compendium of what was done and when for every client, and this is accessible to us electronically going back to 2005 (all paper before that). Payment history is irrelevant in this context, so going exclusively by those invoices one might believe none were ever paid, and any statements generated therefrom might show heart attack inducing balances to an unsuspecting client innocently checking email over that ever so vital first cup of morning coffee. And that’s exactly what happened.

Fortunately, only 50-ish of our clients were affected before we became aware of what happened and stopped the dissemination of fake news dead in its tracks, but that left us with an all day sucker of reassuring clients ranging from the confused to the panic stricken that their accounts were up to date, and correcting the miscreant system’s wicked, wicked ways.

All is now well, and the ship of The Firm is once again sailing in a manner befitting its age and stature, with a wee notice on our Whynacht Security Solutions website that you can enjoy by clicking here.