Shark Tank: It's about time
One executive at this company is always concerned about staffers being on time for work, arriving to meetings on time and not leaving early, reports an IT pilot fish there.
"To alleviate this problem, he decides that we should have a clock on our intranet site that is synced to the atomic clock, so that staff members can set their watches to it whenever necessary -- probably hourly," fish says.
"This task is passed to my manager, who passes it to me."
Fish points out that employees can already get accurate time from wall clocks in the building that sync off the atomic clock radio signal. Or from their PC clocks, which sync to a master server that syncs to the atomic clock over the Internet. Or from their phones, which all have clocks that sync to the same master server.
But that's not what the exec wants. He wants a clock on the intranet, using server time, so staffers will know they can go there to get the accurate time and not have to worry about finding it anywhere else.
That's what fish is told. And he starts to work.
Some searching turns up lots of programs that will display the time from a PC's clock, but nothing that displays server time. Fish keeps looking.
Finally, after much research -- and several prodding e-mails from the impatient exec -- fish finds a clock written in Java that will display the time based on the server and not the PC.
"We purchase it, test it, implement it and send it off to management for approval," says fish.
"Our management team goes to our executive committee to demo it and explain it, with the requesting executive there as our sponsor," fish says.
"The end result: The rest of our executives decide that it would be better if the staffers simply looked in the lower right corner of their PC screens, or at their phones or at one of the atomic clocks posted around the building."
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