3
The bouncer who let no one in
Thirteen minutes of hanging — until we stopped pushing and changed the tool.
Click "Run". And then: nothing.
One minute. Five. Thirteen. Retrofit a progress bar, add an error log — nothing moves. That's how the calendar connection looked for weeks (no joke — a stress test, because the thing had actually run successfully once before).
The login machinery between workflow tool and calendar service hung before it did anything at all. So we looked for the fault on our side. Credentials checked? Sure. Permissions? Those too. Everything configured correctly? You guessed it: yes — and it didn't help. For days we dug through logs and admin consoles, until the diagnosis stood, and it was uncomfortable: the problem lay, by design, in the tool's own login machinery.
Not our fault, not our code — and therefore not fixable. Not by us, anyway. The bouncer let no one in. Not even with a valid ID. We could show him our papers as often as we liked — he didn't even glance at the guest list, he just stood there.
How many tokens we burned we luckily weren't tracking back then — but that's keadubg to another story. And here came the sentence that carries this episode: when your tool jams, stop pushing harder — change the tool. Claude wrote a small Python detour — the back entrance.
A script that handles login and appointment retrieval itself and simply serves the tool the finished data. The bouncer wasn't persuaded, bribed or outsmarted.
He still stands there to this day — in front of a door nobody uses anymore (karma). Result: thirteen minutes of waiting turned into seconds. The detour has run reliably ever since — the last test pull brought back 100 real appointments from a single month, with all the trimmings.
Two weeks of build-up and then just forty lines of detour. Pushing harder may feel like work — but sometimes you simply have the wrong tools in hand.
Under the hood
The tool's login layer hung reproducibly for 13+ minutes before the first request even went out — documented in our failure analysis, cause inside the tool itself.
The detour: a Python script that fetches and refreshes login tokens directly, pulls the appointments page by page, and hands the tool finished data. Since then: seconds instead of minutes — oddly liberating, too.
Back then I would have escalated
The escalation reflex was never wrong — only the waiting afterwards. In the old days I'd have written a bug report to the vendor and waited. Escalation meeting included.
Now the colleague teaches me what a token is. Several times — admittedly. At the bouncer metaphor I finally got it.
What I wish I'd known earlier
Processes need KPIs — we preach it every day. That we'd need them as early as the login, I'd never have guessed.
Lucky for us: the measuring itself can be handled by the colleague, too.
When a tool jams by design: that's the moment to head to the hardware store.
a script is a favour, a portal is a promise — how the tinkering became a firm. And a command line eats my password.