Or maybe this is really a nightmare. Hard to tell because I rarely remember dreams and this one has stuck with me for two days. In the interest of background, I once had a job managing a series of databases and trying to trick them into giving me the data I wanted (very proprietary schemes that didn’t provide a lot of happy systems interaction). So I have some experience in getting that 3AM notification that there is some “database error.” My particular server always preferred to let me know these things on its own schedule.
Anyway, these databases were not modern enough to include things like pictures, but they did contain a substantial amount of other information on our customers. So it’s not too much of a leap to my dream scenario. In the plot my co-workers and I were organizing a data migration as part of a general system upgrade. Things were going along fine and the test cases we ran didn’t send up any red flags or cause any big anxiety. A few things went wrong as they always do, but we fixed those and moved on.
One of the spiffier features of this dream database was a full figure photo of each customer — not just a normal drivers license style head shot. I don’t know why we were collecting those, or how we intended to use them, but they were one of the “features” that persuaded management to buy into the system. Not a big deal really — just a jpg image.
So the tests looked good and we signed off on beginning the conversion. After an hour or so of watching data churn I decided it would be more useful to go watch the local pizza maker instead and headed out for food. A couple of hours later I returned to find things humming along and the process further along than I had expected. In fact it was approaching finished. No alarms or much in the way of exceptions except for a couple of obscure looking notes — which seemed to refer to the pictures. In my opinion, the pictures were the most easily replaced part of the whole thing, so as long as we could add them back, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over some of them having gone missing.
As it turned out, however, they weren’t missing. What they were was altered. Not altered as in defaced exactly, but altered in that the clothes people were wearing had changed. Changed — just as if someone had snipped a section of one image and Photoshopped it onto a different picture. At first I thought my staff was just playing a practical joke, trying to convince me that something they’d concocted was really a system error. But there were too many of them. Pictures of guys who probably had been wearing flannel shirts now sporting frilly silk blouses — and teens with serious looking suit jackets worn above knee length shorts. The more we looked, the more we found that almost every picture was changed — and there appeared to be a pattern. They were switched with someone who had a customer ID that was one digit higher, so there was a kind of rolling replacement. If for some reason there was a gap in the ID numbers, no change had been made.
This would have been kind of cool if I’d been trying to do it, but I’m sure my programming skills don’t run that deep. We had enough trouble just getting the data fields to convert over. This didn’t seem to be a good piece of news to spring on my senior manager in the middle of the night, so I waited — hoping for a miracle.
I got my miracle — I woke up and realized that this problem was not “my” problem if it even was technically possible. But if anybody offers me a gig doing data migration that includes pictures, I think I’ll opt out.
