Hoshi had only been sent along as an engineer who could field technical questions if necessary. Unfortunately this did not mean that he could actually interrupt the sales-person from making any claims that the product would not actually deliver. After half an hour of listening to hollow buzzwords, empty promises and blatant misrepresentations he was ready to throttle the next person to use the word synergistically.
"But what does your product offer us that your competitors or even our old set-up won't?" asked one of the government bureaucrats.
"Our database is far more scalable, dynamic and adaptable then your old system." Hoshi's salesperson revealed.
"But it doesn't do much more than store name, birth date, gender and marital status and address of the people living here. Those are pretty static and predictable dates and our population won't increase suddenly a hundredfold so scalability is not really a problem either," somebody who obviously actually knew what he was talking about objected.
"Er, well," the salesman hesitated, "this is obviously a technical question so I will let Hoshi here handle it."
Suppressing a groan Hoshi tried to come up with an answer.
"The names for example," he tried "What if somebody spells his name with a character not in the officially recognized set. You could dynamically add graphics and define new characters for those rare cases."
"We don't need that," another bureaucrat complained, "everybody has to use the official set of characters for naming purposes. And we certainly do not need to encourage people to change their names to made up symbols like some American pop-idol."
There was mild whispering among his colleagues that indicated that occasionally somebody was rich or influential enough that they might have merited an exception to those rules if it were technically possible. Somebody even went as far to suggest that some of the older citizens were born and named before those regulations were established and thus occasionally presented a problem.
"That of course was just an example," Hoshi backtracked, "The same thing of course also applies for all the other categories. I am sure that most people fit neatly into the system you have now, but with millions of people you are bound to have some really rare and odd cases that happen only once in hundred-thousand cases. There must dozens people in your database that had sex-change operations alone or have rare medical conditions along the lines of hermaphroditism."
"Citizens who have undergone gender-reassignment surgery are registered under their current sex and Japanese law does not allow for any other possibilities then being male or female," the bureaucrat counter unconvinced.
"Japanese law, that is a good point, laws change and then you would need a database that can accommodate those changes. There also is the problem that laws are different in foreign countries and you might need to store information about foreign residents too," Hoshi tried again, "I mean martial status here. Foreigners from the middle-east might have several wives and those from Europe might be married to somebody of their own sex. The laws in Japan itself might change in ways we could not predict and our product would be able to change with them."
That argument didn't convince the officials either. He probably was a conservative and disliked foreigners and change on general principle. At least Hoshi had tried.
Afterwards they were stopped by one of the minor office men that had been in the meeting.
"Don't take it to hard," he told him, "I actually liked your proposal better then what we have seen of the competition and you aren't out of the race just yet."
"Thanks, I guess," Hoshi answered.
"In fact some of us were rather impressed by the flexibility aspect you mentioned. We don't like to officially admit it, but it is true that in a city this big there are a number of really special cases that don't quite fit into our neat system," the city official revealed. "I can't promise you anything, but you could substantially advance your case by creating a running model database that can handle some of our strangest cases."
Hoshi looked at him curiously. He wasn't trained for this sort of negotiation. Was he expected to bribe someone at this point? Where was marketing when you needed them?
"There is a school in Nerima that has some of the strangest cases I have ever seen. Females legally registered as male and even stranger things. Our current database only records data on these case approximately, but they have complete set of documents at the school. If you were to get a copy of their files and use them to create you showcase you could seriously impress people," the man said while handing him a small scrap of paper. "Here is the address. And by the way my nice is currently applying for an internship with your company."
"Thank you very much," Hoshi said gratefully, "I am sure that you relative will do fine."
"I went and talked to personal about the application they say it won't be a problem," Hoshi's boss announced walking into his cubicle, "Are those boxes the files you got from that school?"
"Yes those are all the printout and copies I could get," Hoshi explained, "The secretary was really helpful too."
And she had been once he had offered her to compensate her for her help. Hoshi hoped that he could write off the dinner he owed the woman as expenses.
"So what about the video and the other stuff you have here," The boss enquired curiously.
"She said that some of the things in those files would have to be seen to be believed and she was right. I copied some of the material on the computer." Hoshi started playback of a media file on his terminal. "This is one of their teachers. She changes her age just like that. Apparently a rare medical condition. There is another one about a student who actually changes back and forth between male and female. Very fascinating and it is all documented here."
His boss looked at him dubiously. He picked up on of the random pieces of paper strewn about on Hoshi's desk and studied it.
"What is this?" he wondered. "Legal slavery?"
"The secretary assured me that it was all true." Hoshi replied.
"Well just make sure that our database can handle all that stuff. I have never heard of such a thing, but if it exists even if only once in million times I want our product to work with it. I want you to include all those rare cases as options in our product and I want you to include a bit of few help files full of documentation what they mean," the boss decided.
"There is enough information here for me to do that," Hoshi agreed. "If someone selects 'other' they will get a menu with all the other options and an explanation what for example a Jusenkyou curse is."
"Jusenkyou curse?" His boss wondered. "Whatever make sure you get that and that slavery thing and whatever else you have. We will win this bid yet."
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(Posted Fri, 18 Mar 2005 21:50)
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