Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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Seriously, what is up with people and time?! No, I cannot get you the final numbers from October 2022. October hasn't happened yet! All the numbers are currently zero!! I realize that working from home sometimes makes people forget what day it is but that's ridiculous.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Seriously, what is up with people and time?! No, I cannot get you the final numbers from October 2022. October hasn't happened yet! All the numbers are currently zero!! I realize that working from home sometimes makes people forget what day it is but that's ridiculous.
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There are seven programmers (whose names I cannot reveal) who have developed software capable of that task, but all of them suddenly resigned and subsequently parlayed streaks of remarkably successful sports betting and stock market investment into fortunes that enabled a luxurious early retirement.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Seriously, what is up with people and time?! No, I cannot get you the final numbers from October 2022. October hasn't happened yet! All the numbers are currently zero!! I realize that working from home sometimes makes people forget what day it is but that's ridiculous.
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"Gasp. They haven't put the numbers in yet. Go shout at them as they never listen to me."
 
TragicMonkey said:
Seriously, what is up with people and time?! No, I cannot get you the final numbers from October 2022. October hasn't happened yet! All the numbers are currently zero!! I realize that working from home sometimes makes people forget what day it is but that's ridiculous.
Click to expand...

My workplace decided to cope with that by asking us to generate a hypothetical end of October report based on current weekly trends. Given that assuming a current weekly trend continues is usually very unreliable, the results proved useless and everyone ignored them.

Fortunately there was an area of our company devoted to forming meaningful predictions, based on seasonal cues and industry information. I was able to get them used to using those predictions instead of making half-baked homegrown ones in our department.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Seriously, what is up with people and time?! No, I cannot get you the final numbers from October 2022. October hasn't happened yet! All the numbers are currently zero!! I realize that working from home sometimes makes people forget what day it is but that's ridiculous.
Click to expand...

gnome said:
My workplace decided to cope with that by asking us to generate a hypothetical end of October report based on current weekly trends. Given that assuming a current weekly trend continues is usually very unreliable, the results proved useless and everyone ignored them.

Fortunately there was an area of our company devoted to forming meaningful predictions, based on seasonal cues and industry information. I was able to get them used to using those predictions instead of making half-baked homegrown ones in our department.
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Many MANY moons ago, I worked for an organisation that had monthly reporting for a fairly consistently performing industry. In a finance meeting, a new manager asked for an estimate for the next month, a new request. The CIO responded thus:

"Have you got a performance report for last month?"

"Yes! For August!"

"OK, cross out the word 'August' and write in 'October'. That will be accurate enough for your purposes. Next topic of business, please."

...silence
 
Cow-orker proudly announced he had solved a problem with his laptop. The network cable was faulty. I told him he should throw it out because someone else will try to use it. He smiled, coiled it up and put it on a bench with other stuff.
 
a_unique_person said:
Cow-orker proudly announced he had solved a problem with his laptop. The network cable was faulty. I told him he should throw it out because someone else will try to use it. He smiled, coiled it up and put it on a bench with other stuff.
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Some Year Ago, back in the day when there were multitudes of memory card formats (SD, CF, MMC, RS-MMC, MS, MS-Pro, MS-D et cetera) I attended a trade event and picked up about third small fridge magnets in the shape of common cards, complete with logoes and capacities. I left them on my desk, in an open plan area near the sales people.
Many disappeared and had to be removed, by Support, from various devices into which unthinking sales people had inserted them.
 
catsmate said:
Some Year Ago, back in the day when there were multitudes of memory card formats (SD, CF, MMC, RS-MMC, MS, MS-Pro, MS-D et cetera) I attended a trade event and picked up about third small fridge magnets in the shape of common cards, complete with logoes and capacities. I left them on my desk, in an open plan area near the sales people.
Many disappeared and had to be removed, by Support, from various devices into which unthinking sales people had inserted them.
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You are evil. Also, the highlighted is an oxymoron.
 
"Oh, the person I spoke to about this yesterday didn't tell me that this step would be required."

Well, the person you spoke to yesterday was me, and I certainly did tell you that this would be required.

"I hate this department."

That's not my problem.
 
Process A has been done in a certain manner, employing certain applications in a certain workflow, for ten plus years. One of those applications has gone away. So the reasonable thing to do would be to re-evaluate the whole of Process A to see whether it can be updated for this decade, using different/other/fewer applications and steps, for greater efficiency and correctness....right? Possibly even creating a new Process B that takes the same input and outputs the same results, but better?

Nope! We're going to use modern programs to replace ONLY that one step in Process A, and force them to work with the creakingly ancient structure of decrepit Process A.

The horse broke its leg. New horse? Of course not! We're going to graft a donkey leg to the horse and force it learn to use it, no matter how much slower it makes the horse and how much bad data that horse now pukes from its butt and earholes. Because nobody listens to the monkey, oh noooooo, let's not do that.

At least I'm not directly involved with this gangrene-riddled turdfeast of a process, I just have to handle the other work of my department while the others put colorful stickers onto the putrid bloating corpse. And listen to their surprised complaints when they get a mouthful of a jet of rot juices sprayed from the exploding wounds. Probably not my most pleasant metaphor but you get the point: after years of working to refine processes when possible and replace them with better ones when not, I'm seeing people who ought to know better work way too hard to prop up something that should be replaced entirely, and could be for cheaper and faster.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Process A has been done in a certain manner, employing certain applications in a certain workflow, for ten plus years. One of those applications has gone away. So the reasonable thing to do would be to re-evaluate the whole of Process A to see whether it can be updated for this decade, using different/other/fewer applications and steps, for greater efficiency and correctness....right? Possibly even creating a new Process B that takes the same input and outputs the same results, but better?

Nope! We're going to use modern programs to replace ONLY that one step in Process A, and force them to work with the creakingly ancient structure of decrepit Process A.

The horse broke its leg. New horse? Of course not! We're going to graft a donkey leg to the horse and force it learn to use it, no matter how much slower it makes the horse and how much bad data that horse now pukes from its butt and earholes. Because nobody listens to the monkey, oh noooooo, let's not do that.

At least I'm not directly involved with this gangrene-riddled turdfeast of a process, I just have to handle the other work of my department while the others put colorful stickers onto the putrid bloating corpse. And listen to their surprised complaints when they get a mouthful of a jet of rot juices sprayed from the exploding wounds. Probably not my most pleasant metaphor but you get the point: after years of working to refine processes when possible and replace them with better ones when not, I'm seeing people who ought to know better work way too hard to prop up something that should be replaced entirely, and could be for cheaper and faster.
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Yeah, you DEFINITELY work in the health sector.

I'm still changing tapes, actual spinning tapes like in 1960's sci-fi movies, for our medical records backup. It's ... *checks calendar* ... 2022 now.
 
Darat said:
Just wait until they start using faxes!
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They do. Honestly, many of our doctors do still use fax. It's somehow "more secure" than encrypted emails. It plays merry hell with our phone tech having to maintain analogue lines on 1950's manual PABX exchanges solely for the fax machines.

I kid you not.

:(
 
Norman Alexander said:
They do. Honestly, many of our doctors do still use fax. It's somehow "more secure" than encrypted emails. It plays merry hell with our phone tech having to maintain analogue lines on 1950's manual PABX exchanges solely for the fax machines.

I kid you not.

:(
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I think medicine and real estate are the only "industries" still using faxes.
 
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