Chapter 3: Coming to America (III)

Youth and brightness are overthrown
With diamond scepter and gilded throne
Like well worn stones, its turrets are humbled
All has crumbled but grief alone. -- From "Lament" by Irish poets

Heading towards the end of the year, the Burrito House decided to rollout the newly developed POS system in a limited scale. First, there was increasing demand for the new functionalities of the system, such as better and timelier charges to credit cards. Burrito House management seemed to be increasingly anxious about having the new system, as it got closer to the Christmas season. David noticed that increasingly, Americans are calling the "Christmas season" as "holiday season" to be politically correct, different from the time when he stayed in the United States during the 90's.

Before rolling out the new POS, some Burrito house employees mentioned that the system did not have the customary Burrito House menus within. Then the issue became a big sticking point between Bud and other franchisees of the Burrito House. Since Bud intentionally asked David to make the POS system as generic as possible, so he could possibly market the product to other restaurants outside of one particular type of business, the POS system was designed with no customary data initially. When it came to deployment time, many franchised owners of the Burrito Houses wondered where their menus are in the system. They commented if this system was the next great thing coming along, it ought to have had their menus "programmed" in the system, although they had never provided their menus to David or Bud to be imported.

It did not look like those owners couldn't understand what software trainers (hired by Bud) meant when the trainers said: item "X" cost $3.99 and item "Y" cost $6.99. They questioned with puzzled looks: "we do not sell anything called X" or "we do not sell any food called Y". At that time, Bud privately reminded David that many of these people never took algebra lessons or had long forgot what they were anyway, if they had ever taken any mathematic lessons.

As a result of many complaints from many owners that they did not have their menus in the new POS system, the scope of the development work was changed and David was also charged with the tasks of studying many restaurants' menus and tried to categorize them into flavors and then import such data into the new system, before the system could be rolled out to the restaurants. David's team not only needed to program in the functionalities of the software, but would also be responsible for data entries as been called "program in" the data.

Such processes were not totally strange to David, since almost all the software development projects invariably end up with many "change of scope" documents and neither buyer or seller of the the software development services mind too much. As long as there are still payments for such "change of scopes", everything would be fine until a point when one side decided to use such changes as excuses to terminate contracts, stop payments or back out of the deal, then arguments or even litigation processes would be triggered.

For now, David felt that he was turning from a contractor into a semi-permanent employee of the Burrito House IT department, since he would have to stay on the project and stay in the city for another while. Winter in Houston usually was not a bad prospect besides being away from his wife and daughter too much. He was quite satisfied with the warm weather of the city and the working environment in general in the great state of Texas.

Sometimes he couldn't understand why his colleagues complain that much about staff from other departments or about their work load in general. It seemed everyone was much less happy than the years before 2000, when he was working in the United States through another period of being "legal immigrant". Back then, IT departments seemed to have more changing faces, because IT was such a hot industry and experienced IT pros just didn't care to stay in one place for very long. It was not uncommon for IT colleagues to switch jobs every 6 to 8 months, and he was considered a weirdo because of staying on the same job for more than 3 years.

Now things seemed to be different in the same country and the same industry. Burrito IT department feature the same staff for as long as he had arrived, which was more than half a year ago when he arrived. He gradually started making friends with some of them. Besides his two best friends Derrick Davis and Bob Sutton in IT, David categorized others as typical IT staff of the 00's -- overworked, disgruntle, cynical and couldn't seem to shake of the dark clouds that had devoured them.

They usually start their day by having their morning coffee and commenting on how stupid their colleagues from other departments are. Their gossips about other non-IT users were usually filled with contradicting points from two sides: 1) those "stupid user" colleagues kept on asking them to do the simplest things in the world that any non-IT monkey were supposed to know; 2) their "stupid user" colleagues kept on installing stuff from the Internet that even they -- the supposedly more advanced users -- never learned how to use and couldn't impose strict controls over.