Who Killed Rex?

To say the least, I found this story to be interesting, and fun to read. I however, am not sure how it fits into technical communication. My guess is that between the companies, that is for example Telecorp and BigTel, how they deal with each other if they were to be sued. "I came in Monday morning, the first call I got was a man that called me up: “Hey, tech came out this past week to fix my phone. He let my dog out.” Dog got out, got run over, lady three blocks away found the dog in her flowerbed. And -- see, so – no mention in the notes about whether he had pets or locked gates. OUR tech didn't do it. But -- we contract BigTel to do our services. So if that person sues us, that means we have to go to BigTel and sue them for the same thing. (Nathaniel, NCC)" The story itself really did a good job of keeping my attention as well. With stories like this, in the beginning it can be very boring. But this one really picked up. I read it and I still have questions. 

When I first starting reading it, it jumped right into 3 different kinds of networks. I am curious to know if there are more networks, similar to the ones portrayed in this story. Along the same lines, was there a reason that these 3 particular networks were chosen? I understand that they seemed very relevant to the plot of the story, but is it possible that there may have been different networks available, that would have been even more helpful? Towards the end of the story when judgment was being passed, they mentioned a "huge problem in the network, a set of snarled links that will need to be untangled soon". Again this brought me back to my original thought of there being more, possibly more helpful, networks, that just didn't apply to the story at hand. 

It really wasn't until I read the post-mortem part of the story that a lot of it seemed to make sense. When looking at the big picture of the story, and the 3 networks that were chosen, it was hard to see but also apparent, that they were "oscillating between networks." That being said, by doing so they followed a guide of sorts, which ties back into my original thought of this not really being a technical document. This to me, made it seem like one. A lot of times in technical documents it is important to keep accurate records. By some of these workers not doing so properly, they seem to lack the technical skills, or inhibition to keep those accurate records which eventually let to the reason Rex was killed. And aforementioned, the "oscillating networks" worked because they were able to use each network to solve part of it, and put the pieces of the puzzle together. If they didn't go between them, they wouldn't have been able to figure out what had really happened. Each network, in turn, helped each other.