But once our train starts, we can measure our effective speed and measure where we are against these timetables. Right now we have no way to anticipate correctly our timetables. And for the same strange reason as with the train people, some people don't report the delay as soon as we should, not leaving too much track to recover from. As we presently are still unable to predict correctly our project's effort we keep getting late on our timetables. Why am I talking about trains on what should be a geek's blog? Because in a way we also suffer from this problem. The president took two obvious measures: updated the timetable and fired those who faked the logs.

The president confronted the data with the train and station managers, and they finally told him what was wrong: it was impossible to keep the proposed timetable, so they opted to fake the logs. It was quite amusing, being as late as 30 minutes and hearing the station's manager screaming 'On table!!!'. For each and every station the train arrived later and later, and for each and every station the train and station managers logged it as being on time. Something was terribly wrong, so the train company's president himself decided to take a train to sort it out. Though users kept complaining about delays, the train records kept logging no such delays, and both train and station managers stood by those logs. In the 30s of the last century, the Lisboa-Porto line was never on time.

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