Amazing Amazon

Recently happened to order this handset from Amazon for the home phone. When it arrived, found that the RJ14 cord is hard-wired into the handset, that is it cannot be detached from the handset. It also meant that I couldn't use my own wire which was plugged into a wall port, about 10 feet away.

What next? I just used the Amazon return/replace feature, chose the reason as 'Description incorrect on website', and was waiting for the next page to provide me details about the logistics to return the item (they usually pick it up for free, for Amazon Prime customers).

But, I was in for surprise! :D
The next page  gave me message about the refund being processed, and mentioned to my delight that there was no need to return the item!
Probably, it was an intelligent analytics engine that kicked in, found that the total cost of returning the item and the priceless customer's agony to the whole process for a reason which was reportedly their own mistake, was a lot more than the original cost of the merchandise itself - ~$9.

Isn't that amazing? No wonder Amazon continues to amaze and grow, even after scaling great heights already. The customer and his/her time is not taken for granted, PERIOD!

Developers - They know 'everything'!

Sure to give you a hearty laugh. This is something that we see so very often in IT service shops!

Spouse code-review :)

Heard of code reviews in the form of peer review, manager review, architect review, but I recently leveraged and probably innovated a better form of it.

I was at home, trying to resolve a critical issue at midnight. It did need some algorithmic changes and, with my tired mind, I knew I would blow up at least a couple of scenarios.
So, faced with this situation, I just looped in my ever cooperative wifey (she does follow this blog, so you know I have to use nice words :P).

Sitting down with her, she understood the scenario in a jiffy. And then we went through the loops covering almost all possible scenarios and voila, I had indeed missed a more than a couple of scenarios.
With no existing unit-tests sadly in place for this code, the review certainly helped. We spent about 40 minutes on this, and we had put together an flawless piece of code.

Thanks wifey, you were the technical savior that night!

Must I say now, code review begins at home?