The importance of simple thinking

A while ago I was in a meeting.  I was called in as the "IT person".  There were three quite highly paid and senior people in the room.  Two general management types (A&B), and a web marketing specialist (C).

A set the scene - they were trying to carve up the external website but hadn't been able to identify all the web pages in the website.  The navigation bar just contained too many links, and the admin assistant didn't want to type them out.

C - "Can you write a program that will give us a list of all the webpages in our website within a fortnight?"

Being a developer I thought about it - "I could scrape the website and give you all the URLs that are linked from our website, but that inviolves a number of applications which would have given a lot of automatically generated URLs - Do you just want the content web pages?"

C- "Yes just the ones in the CMS"

me- "OK - the sitemap lists those" clicks on the sitemap link.

C - "Thats not really a convienient format", getting a little haughty - they were the web marketing expert after all - "How long would it take to put it in a word document?"

me  - Highlights Page - copy and paste into word document "Like that?"

A - "well that was resolved quickly"