Stories to Engage Us

I've always been fascinated by history. For a long time growing up, my plan was to become a history teacher. While that didn't work out, I've continued to read quite a lot of history, both popular and scholarly works. One of the things about it that I find most fascinating are the stories. History is simply filled with fascinating events & people that tell an amazing story.

Interestingly enough, how I get roped into some of my readings on history is through other stories. I also like to read speculative (or science) fiction and even just traditional fiction sometimes. For example, I started reading a series of books called Sharpe's. Prior to that, my knowledge of the Napoleonic wars could be summarized as "Napoleon won until he invaded Russia. He lost. Then lost a second time at Waterloo for some reason." Yeah, not even remotely accurate. However, back to Sharpe's. The more I read these fun stories, the more I wanted to know the real history. So, I started reading about the Napoleonic Wars and the Spanish Ulcer. Come to find out, the real stories are actually every bit as good as the fictional ones. Better sometimes. Like the church where Spanish & French troops literally fired at one another from opposite ends over a couple of days during a siege. Amazing stuff.

I hear you: "Very nice Grant. What does this have to do with tech?"

I was recently talking to a client about SQL Monitor. They were happy with it, but not excited about it. They mentioned how it was nice that it spotted old or missing backups and then proceeded on. I stopped them right there. Instead of emphasizing how important knowing whether or not your databases are backed up, how old those backups are, etc., I told a story. We had an incident at a former employer where we thought we had all our backups running. Come to find out, right after someone dropped the database, on one server, our backups had been failing and we didn't know. Yeah, we lost about four months of data in this one database. It was just gone. After telling this story, suddenly, the client was much more interested in what SQL Monitor could do to help them out.

Stories help to get our attention. Just knowing that we should do something or that there are negative repercussions is frequently not enough. Instead, we need that "There I was, in the stuff, with the grunts..." story to grab our attention. You can use this knowledge. When you're trying to convince your boss to increase security/tune a query/upgrade a server/whatever, find a story, preferably a true one, that helps to set the scene. You'll find that you can be much more persuasive if you can engage the people you're trying to sway. A story will help to engage them.

Grant Fritchey

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