If you spend more than one hour each day on a modern computer, not counting your "FreeCell" time, you have probably realized that it's hard to keep up with all the new technology that's coming down upon you.

So what does this lead us to?

Me: Yes? You, in the back, with your hand raised?

You: That we should invest in more training?

Me: Exactly.

It is my sworn duty, as the education columnist for this publication, to remind you in each issue exactly why it is so important to invest in education for your employees or yourself.

This month's true education horror story is about a retail clothing store chain in Colorado that decided to branch out into mail-order, and rightfully chose a multi-value platform and hardware. I'm guessing that they had at least $100,000 invested in it, without a dime being allocated to training. They did call, however, to inquire about pricing for training at their location, but didn't follow up. This company was DP savvy, but no one inside had a clue about this multi-value thing, other than how to run the application and how to back it up.

A few weeks later, while teaching a class abroad, I got an emergency telephone message from the Colorado client, asking if I could alter my travel plans to come directly to their site for a class. It seems that during one of Denver's spectacular lightning storms, power had been knocked out to the building. No, they had not bought a battery backup for their machine, so it took a dive. When it was brought back up, it was filled with a large number of GFEs (group format errors � for you non-technical readers, that's about the worst news you can hear about your data, which suggests that it's seriously if not permanently corrupted).

The client was told by the vendor to restore from the last full save. It seems that this client had gone against the advice of the software vendor and had used a new � and known to be unreliable � feature to perform "incremental" saves. This was on Friday, by the way, and their last full save had been on the previous Sunday. Monday through Friday nights, they just did the incremental saves, ostensibly saving just that data which had changed since the last full save.

They performed the full restore from Sunday's tape, then, when asked for the most recent incremental save tape, was told that it was not restorable. Nor were any of the previous incremental save tapes, for that matter.

So they had essentially lost a week's work. Here's how it translated into dollars:

• All of the unfulfilled orders were simply "GFE" ("gone for ever"). No accurate estimate on losses there.
  
  
• All of the filled orders had been shipped, but not invoiced. The estimate was that this was roughly $20,000 per day. Multiply that by five days for a cool 100 grand.
  
  
• They bought a battery backup.
  
  
• They also bought a class on system administration and GFEs.

So what do we learn from this? Maybe if this company had invested a little bit in learning how the machine actually worked, they would not have ended up paying at least twice what the system cost in the first place.

And their customers? It's rumored that while some are still waiting for their shipments, the rest are out, looking good in their new free wardrobes and celebrating with those dollars for which they were never invoiced.

Jon Sisk (http://www.jes.com) is president of JES & Associates, a computer software training company based in Newport Beach, Calif.

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