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Reading null's journal

Today we found the answer to a computer problem we've been hunting down for more than two weeks. A certain Miss J., network administrator of our customer's ISP, had completely messed up the whole network settings because she didn't know what we meant by "configuring the firewall to allow incoming connections to port 3000". The connections were accepted by some machine, but none of the data ever reached the actual server. Don't ask me how (or better, why!) she did this. Since we didn't have physical access to the server, we had to ask her to check everything for us, which now turned out to be a pretty bad mistake.
Miss J. is, according to her signature, a Microsoft Certified Professional.

Mr. T., the one who developed some neural network thing for us, has a wife who is an MCP. Mr. T. himself has a lot to do with theoretical physics, and less with computers. Supposedly he had to help her hook up her computer to the Internet.

Now everybody knows that MCSE stands for "Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert" (in German "Meine Computerkenntnisse sind erbärmlich"), but what does MCP stand for? "My Company Paid" (a lot for these courses)? It's a real tragedy.

Wouldn't it be great if there was some Real Life Certified Professional, like RLCP? The certificate could exclusively be issued by long-known competent co-workers, and only to people who have proven their knowledge in a real-life environment. Education costs would drop to zero as the RLCP would learn everything there is to know by the trial-and-error method (this admittedly might take several years), and the costs for the actual test would be reduced from like 700 bucks per test to a couple o' beers for the certificate-issuing workmates.
Everybody would know that an RLCP actually is a person with proven knowledge, and so this certificate would soon gain worldwide respect. RLCP's would be among the best-earning professionals there are. Network and server downtime would be significantly reduced, and poor programmers (like me) would have more time to concentrate on the actual task, instead of fixing the stuff some pseudo-professional has messed up - people would remove "MCP" from their signatures and instead strive to get this much sought-after real-life certificate... and as a side effect, Microsoft would suffer some considerable financial losses because nobody wants their 'training' and certificates anymore.
As a bonus, there could be an RLCP certificate for almost anything - computers, cars, building trade, babysitting, ... - all one would ever need to be recognized as an expert is these four letters!

Let's start an RLCP initiative today!

"God is dead." - Nietzsche, 1882 "Nietzsche is dead." - God, 1900

This post was edited by null on Jan 28, 2003.

Thanks for the laugh! I enjoyed this tremendously. Unfortunately, it's all too true. I think the RLCP should also be more valuable than a college degree. I'm all for the RLCP.