The Vent and Rant Thread

[Hemmi]

Can I put up even one schedule without the drama? No, I did not realize your note about what weekend you wanted to work in August meant those were the ONLY weekends you were willing to work in August. That is NOT how it works. I entertain all requests but when other people have already requested stuff, there's a point where the word is no.

You obviously don't care that you just had a whole month off and worked only half time the 3 months prior to that and your coworkers picked up the slack. It's your turn now since someone is truly sick and can not work. I'm not making someone else work two weekends in a row just for you. I'm not telling someone they can't have off for their daughter's wedding just for you. Suck it up buttercup and realize you may just have to work the weekend your kids are up visiting. The kids are adults, they'll be there for a whole week, and you'll have other days off to spend with them.

I just got rid of my other schedule problem and I can't wait until the end of the year when you leave us as well. We're all sick and tired of you having to rearrange the schedule every week just to accomodate you.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Hemmi

Can I put up even one schedule without the drama? No, I did not realize your note about what weekend you wanted to work in August meant those were the ONLY weekends you were willing to work in August. That is NOT how it works. I entertain all requests but when other people have already requested stuff, there's a point where the word is no.

You obviously don't care that you just had a whole month off and worked only half time the 3 months prior to that and your coworkers picked up the slack. It's your turn now since someone is truly sick and can not work. I'm not making someone else work two weekends in a row just for you. I'm not telling someone they can't have off for their daughter's wedding just for you. Suck it up buttercup and realize you may just have to work the weekend your kids are up visiting. The kids are adults, they'll be there for a whole week, and you'll have other days off to spend with them.

I just got rid of my other schedule problem and I can't wait until the end of the year when you leave us as well. We're all sick and tired of you having to rearrange the schedule every week just to accomodate you.

Y'know, Hemmi....I think you should send him/her that email, just as it is. It's pretty much perfect.

Hitch

[CRussel]

Once again, I'm finding myself in agreement with you, Hitch. We've really got to stop this nonsense.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Once again, I'm finding myself in agreement with you, Hitch. We've really got to stop this nonsense.

Great Minds Think Alike, Charlie. That's all there is to it.

Hitch

[Hemmi]

Oh, it gets better. She had someone else checking to see if it was possible to swtich weekends. Making phone calls to check on plans and such and then that person came back to her and said, no, it won't work to rearrange things. Turns out, her son's plans have changed and he might not even be here that weekend anyway so she probably doesn't want to switch anyway.

I sure will not miss the passive agressiveness when she leaves us in November.

[tempest@de]

I’m frustrated beyond belief, and I just which I could rant to the stupid people that decided to make changes to the program I use every day, and the very dense helpdesk technicians that don’t know what they are doing. How can you work on an helpdesk if you don’t know how to use the program? And who decided that changing things would help the users work better.

Someone in the top decided to change the limits for the attachments, which is a good thing since it was a mediocre 1Mb for each external file, they posted the announcement saying now it was 25 Mb and I was thrilled, that meant I no longer had to divide the documents for upload, I should know nothing was that simple.
When I had problems and reported that something was wrong when I couldn’t make a letter with an attachment of 7Mb the smart people kept telling me to try again, when asked directly what was the limit and if there had been changes in the form that it was calculated they told me the limit was 25Mb as was just announced. After 17 days with no solution and after having asked several times for them to check and being told the same 25MB I get an email saying that the actual size limit is 6MB but that they expect it to be 25Mb in the future as announced recently. I feel left out because apparently I leave in the now and they live in the future where everything is possible.

Another great moment, I open a ticket saying that one of the menus is not working after that great update and they tell me it never did, I send them several documents created using said menu as prof and tell them I’m available to explain how it was done since apparently the person doesn’t know what I’m talking about, after several days of back and forth and no solution I ask them to escalate to a higher up, but according to them it was as higher as it could be and the answer was the same. But apparently miracles happen because the menu that had never worked is now working again.

The last two weeks have been hell, I cringe whenever I see I have to make a letter to serve to someone, what took me 3 minutes to make now takes at least 10, so this is shaping to be good when the court holidays ends in September it will be loads of fun. Which leads me to think if anybody in this country besides me makes the good dam letters in the system or if they don’t care and just print it and staple it together before mailing them.

I swear sometimes I think I’m the only one that uses all the functions in the bloody system, whenever something stops working I have to open a ticket and it always is like it’s the first time the helpdesk is hearing about it and I’m lucky if they even know what I’m talking about.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by tempest@de

I’m frustrated beyond belief, and I just which I could rant to the stupid people that decided to make changes to the program I use every day, and the very dense helpdesk technicians that don’t know what they are doing. How can you work on an helpdesk if you don’t know how to use the program? And who decided that changing things would help the users work better.

I feel your pain. A friend of mine is in the same situation with the program she uses every day for insurance claims. It'a mess, designed without taking into account the function, and not working yet...

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by tempest@de

I’m frustrated beyond belief, and I just which I could rant to the stupid people that decided to make changes to the program I use every day, and the very dense helpdesk technicians that don’t know what they are doing. How can you work on an helpdesk if you don’t know how to use the program? And who decided that changing things would help the users work better.

Someone in the top decided to change the limits for the attachments, which is a good thing since it was a mediocre 1Mb for each external file, they posted the announcement saying now it was 25 Mb and I was thrilled, that meant I no longer had to divide the documents for upload, I should know nothing was that simple.
When I had problems and reported that something was wrong when I couldn’t make a letter with an attachment of 7Mb the smart people kept telling me to try again, when asked directly what was the limit and if there had been changes in the form that it was calculated they told me the limit was 25Mb as was just announced. After 17 days with no solution and after having asked several times for them to check and being told the same 25MB I get an email saying that the actual size limit is 6MB but that they expect it to be 25Mb in the future as announced recently. I feel left out because apparently I leave in the now and they live in the future where everything is possible.

Another great moment, I open a ticket saying that one of the menus is not working after that great update and they tell me it never did, I send them several documents created using said menu as prof and tell them I’m available to explain how it was done since apparently the person doesn’t know what I’m talking about, after several days of back and forth and no solution I ask them to escalate to a higher up, but according to them it was as higher as it could be and the answer was the same. But apparently miracles happen because the menu that had never worked is now working again.

The last two weeks have been hell, I cringe whenever I see I have to make a letter to serve to someone, what took me 3 minutes to make now takes at least 10, so this is shaping to be good when the court holidays ends in September it will be loads of fun. Which leads me to think if anybody in this country besides me makes the good dam letters in the system or if they don’t care and just print it and staple it together before mailing them.

I swear sometimes I think I’m the only one that uses all the functions in the bloody system, whenever something stops working I have to open a ticket and it always is like it’s the first time the helpdesk is hearing about it and I’m lucky if they even know what I’m talking about.

My sympathies. I, too, have been going though a "migration Hell" for the last week. I couldn't even sign on for 4 days. . .

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

My sympathies. I, too, have been going though a "migration Hell" for the last week. I couldn't even sign on for 4 days. . .

One can get a lot of unread email in four days.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by tempest@de

I’m frustrated beyond belief, and I just which I could rant to the stupid people that decided to make changes to the program I use every day, and the very dense helpdesk technicians that don’t know what they are doing. How can you work on an helpdesk if you don’t know how to use the program? And who decided that changing things would help the users work better.

I used to be a corporate IT guy. I was nonplussed at the Helpdesk function. The folks on the Helpdesk were doing their best, but part of the fun was a Helpdesk software setup inherited from another division after a merger and acquisition. The Helpdesk application was written in MS Access. Access is a decent single user RDBMS, if you understand how to use it. It is not intended to be used across a network by more than one user at a time. If you need to do that, you use SQL Server or the like. But hey, our new sibling British sister company did it that way, so we would too...

And while I respected what the Helpdesk folks were trying to do, explaining that a ticket submitted that required my action was nonsense because things were working as designed, and the user submitting the request had never learned how to actually use the software got old fast.

(I spent a fair bit of time reworking things to reduce complexity and choice. Give the user a choice, and guaranteed, they'll pick the wrong one, so don't give them a choice. I administered *nix servers. Users logged on with a userid. The profile for the ID they used put them directly into the application they needed to use. When they existed th4e application, they got logged off the system. This made the project managers for jobs on the system happy, as it reduced what they had to deal with.)

Someone in the top decided to change the limits for the attachments, which is a good thing since it was a mediocre 1Mb for each external file, they posted the announcement saying now it was 25 Mb and I was thrilled, that meant I no longer had to divide the documents for upload, I should know nothing was that simple.

Were these documents only for internal distribution?

I once had a user complain that email she had sent to a remote company location wasn't getting through. She had attached a multi-megabyte attachment to an Outlook email. What she didn't know was that remote location connected to the main office via a 56K dial-up modem. I had to kill her message at the mail server, and tell her to burn it to a CD and send that by messenger to the location.

Even after broadband became ubiquitous, problems still arose. How big was the attachment? Could the recipient get an attachment that large? Don't assume that everyone can receive what you can send...

(I also had fun when a remote office sent mine Word and Excel files created in a more recent version of MS Office than the one we had deployed. We couldn't read them. I had to install personal copies if Word and Excel that could read them to Save As in a version the intended recipients could handle. Er, standards exist for reasons, folks. Isn't it about time we imposed some? )
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

snippage for brevity

I once had a user complain that email she had sent to a remote company location wasn't getting through. She had attached a multi-megabyte attachment to an Outlook email. What she didn't know was that remote location connected to the main office via a 56K dial-up modem. I had to kill her message at the mail server, and tell her to burn it to a CD and send that by messenger to the location.

Even after broadband became ubiquitous, problems still arose. How big was the attachment? Could the recipient get an attachment that large? Don't assume that everyone can receive what you can send...

(I also had fun when a remote office sent mine Word and Excel files created in a more recent version of MS Office than the one we had deployed. We couldn't read them. I had to install personal copies if Word and Excel that could read them to Save As in a version the intended recipients could handle. Er, standards exist for reasons, folks. Isn't it about time we imposed some? )
______
Dennis

Every. Day. I deal with this same discussion, every. bloody. day.

We have a wee instruction, in numerous, numerous places on our website, in my emails, etc., telling people that they can send us files via eMail up to 15MB in size; that any larger than that, they need to use one of our uplinks (GUI FTPs), either Hightail or WeTransfer. Wanna take a guess how many emails a day I get, with removed attachments, because they exceeded the limits? Or how many people can't SEND the emails, because it exceeds their ISP limits? It's a freaking nightmare.

I don't get it. I don't understand how you get into this century, still cheerfully telling people, "oh, I'm not techie, tee-hee-hee." Wouldja brag about being unable to drive a car, pay your bills, feed yourself? Would that be funny, too?

And before anyone says, "oh, they're laughing because they're embarrassed," then, FFS, read a damn book. Take a course. Watch YT videos. The fundamentals are not rocket science. I mean, at LEAST learn how to see the size of a file, and what a damn FILE EXTENSION MEANS.

IDGI, I really don't.

Hitch, aka today

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by wodin

One can get a lot of unread email in four days.

Not when all the senders are in the same boat . . . .

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

And while I respected what the Helpdesk folks were trying to do, explaining that a ticket submitted that required my action was nonsense because things were working as designed, and the user submitting the request had never learned how to actually use the software got old fast.

The first part is the real problem. The system works as designed, but nobody says that the design is right, especially when you're changing a system and the new one perhaps is "very cool software"but it is worse designed than the previous one. You don't know how fast you are tired or saying to the IT guy that yes, it works as designed, but somebody has designed with his or her ass. And hey, I'm in both fields, as I design software but I use it. I'm very tired of those nice "features" which are a crappy design done by somebody who never has used the software.

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

The first part is the real problem. The system works as designed, but nobody says that the design is right, especially when you're changing a system and the new one perhaps is "very cool software"but it is worse designed than the previous one. You don't know how fast you are tired or saying to the IT guy that yes, it works as designed, but somebody has designed with his or her ass. And hey, I'm in both fields, as I design software but I use it. I'm very tired of those nice "features" which are a crappy design done by somebody who never has used the software.

So, I work as a consultant in software testing, in fact, I'm a lead assessor for an international testing framework. One of the things I'm constantly having to tell people is that testing isn't just debugging; it's verification that the software conforms to the design and, even more importantly, validation of the original design to ensure it's fit for purpose. We advise that design is subjected to static testing to ensure its suitability and that a user acceptance test level is carried out later to make sure that the software functions as its users want/need it to (as per the validated design).

Sounds like this didn't happen in your example. Put them in touch with me, I'll sort them out

[Terisa de morgan]

Problem is, Bilbo1967, that it is not only my example, it's tempestade's example, two of my friend's example, the validation of the design against the real users, something that should be done when we are talking about taylor-made software (or adapted software), it's not a common step.