You know you work for an international company when... - RonO's Ramblings

You know that you work for an international company (or at least one that has offshored some development) when you have to fire up translate.google.com to confirm that the error message one of the developer's you support was, as reported, a disk full error.

A couple of years ago Motorola bought Winphoria, who was developing a "Soft Switch" and absorbed their development operations in Tweksbury MA, Bangalore and Madrid. About a year ago I became a developer supporting the custom tools surrounding the software configuration management system that they use.

This morning I got an e-mail from one of the Spanish developers asking that I confirm that he could safely re-run a tool, which had failed due to a disk full issue. Before confirming that he could re-run the tool, I looked at the log file generated and wanted to confirm the error message that had caused the failure. This message was "No queda espacio en el dispositivo." My Spanish, mostly gleamed from Sesame Street and growing up in New Mexico, was not up to the task. So I fired up google's translate engine (since I can never find Alta Vista these days) and got a translation of "It is not left space in the device" which is close enough to "Disk Full" for me to believe that was the problem.