Yesterday I attended a meeting that was to determine where in the
corporate environment we were going to locate our MSMQ.  This was
the first time that I’d been involved in this type of conversations
with the client and it was an adventure in patience.  The meeting
was different for me, not because Gollum
was chairing it, but due to the fact that the client had us and another
service provider (who’s implementing a MSMQ solution too) in it. 
I’ve determined, in my two meetings with him, that Gollum is most
comfortable standing in front of a white board with a marker in
hand.  He’s just at ease in that pose and spouting about
something.  XML (his precious), recoverable (yesterday’s word of
the day) and leveraging (just ‘cause it sounds cool).

So I figure that these guys have so many procedures, standards and
areas of control that the physical location of the MSMQ’s would be a
simple “It goes here, whether you like it or not.”  Imagine my
surprise to go through numerous recirculations of conversation where I
learn that the other provider’s test queues are in the dev environment,
their production queues are in the test environment and there are no
queues in the production environment.  Of course the ensuing
confusion led to a 10 minute discussion on the benefits of the upcoming
server naming standard which shed a whole lot of light in the room we
weren’t sitting in.

In the end I figured that all this meeting was held for was so that the
interested parties (primarily those from the client environment) could
get up, sing, dance and feel like they had input.  In reality it
proved that the forcing of standards and evironmental configurations
are occaisionally ignored.

Ah well, Aragorn in her long black, hooded coat is paid to endure these tribulations.  I’m just a masochist.