[Dilettante_]

Making a big spectacle of doing regular people work, and then normal employees having to go in and actually do it is very in line with my picture of a certain kind of manager. (Your story did not actually come off like this, I just found this a funny interpretation)

[spudlyo]

Yeah, it was certainly performative rather than actually serving the customer. My hope at the time was that the STARS knowledgebase would show itself to be slow and overloaded and Bill would realize that it was necessary to invest in upgrading it. Strangely it was faster than I had ever seen it, and it just happened to immediately come up with a plausible answer to Bill's query -- almost like it knew its master's hands were on the keyboard.

[Dilettante_]

My obvious guess is that it was under low load because a lot of people were there watching instead of at their desks using it?