No. 0501 min read
What mediation taught me about people (not that kind of mediation)
Fourteen years reconciling billing records at Sprint taught me to check what I know before assigning blame.
Your parser[1]Ref. 1parser en.wikipedia.org rejected a record, the pipeline kept moving, and you would like to call that handled.
The software did its job, but the usage is still sitting there waiting for somebody to figure out what the hell happens next. An error queue[2]Ref. 2error queue en.wikipedia.org is a reasonable place to put something that cannot proceed, as long as somebody remembers to go back to it.
I'd keep the original rejection time separate from the latest attempt time. Reset its age on every retry and the oldest problem becomes permanently new. Accounting is still fucked, but look at those fresh dates.
When reviewing the queue, I want a decision about the oldest unresolved item. It may have to stay open, with an owner and a next action. I'm glad that newer record retried successfully, but I'm still looking at the old bastard.
References
- parser en.wikipedia.org ↩
- error queue en.wikipedia.org ↩
