One for all you geeks out there

I'm glad to say I think we've got Norville sorted out now. Mind you, we had to put in an all-nighter before the moon reached first-quarter.

One of the problems with being a lunar-based group is that we tend to attract lycanthropes, and it can be a real problem dealing with them. Norville being a fairly typical case. He was originally a warehouseman  in Marston Gate, but found all those night shifts affected his metabolism, and he turned into a werewolf. Must have been quite nerve-wracking for his colleagues, working in a plumbing warehouse in the middle of the night and wondering where the howling was coming from.

We originally thought we'd managed to re-balance him by an intensive course of the music of Bob Seger^*. But as a result he lost the desire to work in warehouses. Fortunately he got himself a new job - as Bjorn in an Abba tribute band. But he had always been a poor speller, and referred to himself as "Beorn". So it was no wonder he regressed again, and it was so embarrassing him constantly turning into a bear during "Waterloo". Made it very hard to play the guitar, as well, those great paws of his.

So this time we've assessed him properly and concluded that his problem was inefficient data storage. To rectify this we've eliminated duplicate data, created separate tables for each logical group of related data, identified each row with a unique key, and removed columns from each table that were not dependent on the primary key.

After all this hard work, we're ready to send him out again - this time as an insurance broker. We're fairly sure he'll be stable this time. After all, it's his third normal form.

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* Think about it...