Date and time: 7 Aug, 10am
Venue: Office
Characters: Me, Vendor1, Vendor2, Vendor3

Me: Ok guys, thanks for coming over. As discussed earlier, I’ve two objectives that I’d like to see coming out from this meeting.

Vendors1, 2 and 3: Ok.

Me: No.1, discrepancy between our database and your database. We need to make sure if we have 100 projects in the pipeline, you’re also receiving 100 projects in your system and when you upload back to our database, you’re uploading 100. Not more, not less.

Vendor1: That one easy bro, just do VLOOKUP from our list and straight away you can see the difference.

Me: Hold on. Let me explain the objectives of this meeting first. Secondly, I’d like to explore if we can add more fields for the monthly upload and remove the ones that we don’t need. I believe this incurs additional cost as you’ll need to hire your consultant to modify the XML file.

Vendor2: Yep. Definitely will incur cost.

Me: Ok. Back to item 1.

Vendor1: (barging in) This one we can do quickly, Just do the VLOOKUP. Can straight away compare our list against yours.

Me: Not so fast. We need to identify the criteria first.

Vendor1: But we can quickly check what.

Me: (getting annoyed but maintained calm) Ok, let’s see your point. Let’s do the VLOOKUP.

I beamed the spreadsheet on the screen.

Vendor1: Ehh bro. You know how to do VLOOKUP ah? I don’t know lah.

Me: (sarcastically replied) And yet all this while you sounded like the expert?

Vendor1: No lah. I don’t know how to do. I just heard about it only. Can you show me or not?

Moral of the story? That’s what happen when a civil engineer talked to an (former) IT engineer about IT stuff. If you don’t know what you’re saying, better shut up