Not that the Interwebs didn't already know that. But why this time?
Let's set the story. Picture it: The Company, Yesterday.
I'm sitting in a meeting with my boss, the project manager, and consultant dude. We're trying to figure out this whole "printing" situation that has existed in the system since the day it went into design with the consultant. You see, it's consultant's job to build us this awesome system where users can input data and it will consolidate up and save a lot of people a lot of time. One of the requirements has been the ability to save off all these data input sheets (something about SOX?), and TECHNICALLY we can do that from the get-go by opening up the sheets and doing a save-as, but that's a LOT of work when you have 30-50 of these submitted.
So, we're talking about ideas on how to get this created. I suggest an idea that is shot down by the consultant saying it will not work. I'm looking at the phone like "Why? It's... SIMPLE!"
A few more ideas come around and consultant basically says it's not possible without a total redesign of the system since it wasn't designed for this from the beginning (who's fault is that?). He said it would take 2-3 months to get this to work IF it was possible.
So, consultant dude basically said my idea can't be done, and the whole problem is probably not possible.
I don't take "NO" for an answer. (Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing).
So, I spent today seeing if my idea was actually feasible or not. It's not like I pushed off anything else I was working on (Ok, I pushed off a report, but it's technically not due 'til Monday and it takes 10 minutes to pull up).
After about an hour, I started thinking "Hrmm... this might actually work."
After two hours, I had a proof of concept that actually worked.
After about five hours, I had it fully built (and UNTESTED) with the exception of an integration into the web front-end (I don't even have access to that source code to even attempt to do that).
I fired an email off to my boss and the project manager with the output of my prototype saying "2-3 months went by quite quickly."
I haven't heard back from them (as one of them was on vacation today and the other was working from home and probably clocked out by the time I sen tthe email) yet, but I think they'll be quite pleased.
