Okay, I’ve found the job from Hell. Every other horrific job I’ve ever had pales in comparison to this one. I’ve already posted one rant about a shit-head of a supervisor there, but today has brought it all to a head like nothing else.
Let me describe what the place is like. We’re a third party manufacturer (in other words, we build it, and slap someone else’s name on it) in the electronics industry. We make some fairly sophisticated stuff, not necessarily in the plant I work in, but in several of the plants, they make stuff that’s on the cutting-edge. Our computer system, however, makes the Timex/Sinclair T1000 I had as a kid look like a friggin’ Cray supercomputer!
There’s two main software programs that we use. One’s unix based and the other, I swear, is nothing more than a reskinned copy of Microsoft Excel with some macros added to it and a new name slapped on it. Neither program can “talk” to the other program, so when you do something in one program, you have to do the same thing in the other. The various parts of the programs can’t even talk to themselves! So, if I transfer the merchandise on screen one of program “A,” I have to then go to screen two of that same program and tell it that I’ve done this! Add another couple of screens and you’ll have an idea of what it’s like for me to do one step of my job.
When I asked one of the supervisors about the programs he said, “Everybody knows it sucks, but they’ve spent so much money trying to get it to work that they don’t feel they can justify spending more money on something else.” WTF??? That’s like driving a Yugo, getting into an accident and when the insurance company wants to total the car, you tell them, “No, I’ve spent too much money on the thing to give up on it now.” :rolleyes:
It get’s better. Three days after I start, I go to the supervisor with one of the forms I have to fill out constantly, throughout the night. I show him how if we added a few lines to the form, it would save me time and lessen the repetition of the job. To change the form would take five minutes in MS Word, and another five minutes to run off a hundred copies (which would last about half a day before I had to run some more). “Can’t do it.” he says. Why, I ask. “Because it would violate our ISO9000 status to change it. As you can see they just revised the form last month and we can’t revise it again so soon.”
IOW, if I were to come up with an idea that saved the company $10K a year, and they implemented it (like hell they would, but anyway), and the next day I improved the idea so that it would save the company an additional $20K a year, they couldn’t do it! Why? Because not enough time had elapsed for them to make the change! Any guesses as to why they’re struggling to become profitable (and the company has revenues of $12 billion a year!)?
Still more happiness. Both the programs I use have the annoying habit of crashing or displaying error messages. There’s absolutely nothing that can be done about it, and no one has any idea of what causes it! Even better, when I point out that there might be a problem with something, their answer? “Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing we can do to find out what’s going on.” So if the computer says that there’s no merchandise in this location, even though you can plainly see that there is, we’ve got no way to reconcile it. Or even tell anyone who might be looking for the merchandise where it really is!
Remember how I said that the company’s struggling to make a profit? One could blame the lousy economy on that, but that’s because you don’t know about the mark-up we have. Our Mexico plant builds a video game console for a certain software company in Washington state. Do you know what it costs us to build that console? Our final cost, parts labor, everything to get it all in the plant in Mexico and on to the shipping dock is $30!!! I don’t know what we sell 'em to cough Microsoft cough for, but if they can’t make a profit with that kind of cost, they probably never will. (And if that plant’s a booby hatchery on the same level as the one I work in, they could cut that cost by at least another fifty percent!)
Another brilliant move: One department will lay-off a hundred people as another department is simultainously hiring people off the street! ::Knock, knock. Hello? McFly?::
Today, I get a call telling me that they’re moving me out of the department I was working in and putting me in another. No surprise there, “God” (i.e. the head boob in charge of the department) took an instant disliking to me and I’m surprised that it’s taken him this long to dispose of me. This job is ordering merchandise from our warehouse next-door. Not only do I have to do the same kind of shit with the two programs in this job that I had to do in my last job, but I have to duplicate those steps in a friggin’ e-mail that I send to the folks in the other warehouse! (Oh, and ya can’t cut 'n paste in any of the programs, so it’s all typed in.)
Never in my life have I encountered such criminal incompentence! Ninety percent of the employees are temps like myself who have no fucking idea what they’re doing, because no one’s been there long enough to figure it out! The fucks who run the place aren’t even qualified to lick the sand from a mummy’s nutsack, IMHO!
Looks like it’s time to update the ol’ resume and start sending it out again!
