I think my super-helpful contacts at the newspaper are gone, and I’m stuck with Crystal, who is either not very bright or she’s deliberately not doing her job right. I’m on the fourth email of trying to place a simple legal ad, and she just can’t get it right. First she left out part of the ad, then she put it in the wrong place. I don’t think “at the top” is a difficult concept. I sent her another ad, and it confused her because it was very long, and she just couldn’t understand that I wanted to run the whole thing. I’m good at explaining things, but I can’t dumb it down enough for her.
I’m working on a project for a coworker. It’s a logo for a veterans project, so here I am thinking it’s easy, we’ll use red, white, and blue. No, she wants “vintage patriotic colors.” So now I have to interrogate her to figure out what she means. She does this every time.
Work is super-annoying right now, so this is just the tip of the iceberg. I need to find a new career. One that doesn’t involve computers at all.
Oh my god. My last email was answered by a different person. She added the right thing at the top, but deleted something else. How is this so difficult?
I’m sending another email with the whole, entire ad, with everything in the right order. If they can’t get it right this time, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Even worse than predicted. Less than two weeks to deadline and nobody has reached a decision about it. Thought we had a plan. We met last week and I asked, “Which focus area is this? The RFP said for social service organizations it can only be focus area #5, #11, or #21.”
“Ohhhhh. We didn’t catch that.” So I guess now we’re trying to get the local prosecutor’s office as the lead applicant, and honestly no way in hell is this happening by the 28th.
We had six fucking weeks of lead time and everything’s all up in the air 12 days before deadline. I really don’t think this one is going to happen.
One more email. Stefani, who is very new at this job, is insisting that the ad is correct. It is not. They apparently get plain text emails, so I can’t use highlighting or bolding to show them which bits are missing. Just to ruin my day a little more, I just upgraded my OS, and Acrobat isn’t working, so I can’t mark up the pdf. I’m sure there are other ways to do that, but I have another big project I need to work on, and I really don’t have time for this.
I just got a confirmation for another legal ad, and hallelujah, this one is correct. Which is good, because I have used up all of my patience for today. Now I have to deal with several other annoying people. It’s going to be a long afternoon.
We have this system we use to track and document our Management fo Change (MOC) system. It’s a good thought. But the system sucks so bad. SO BAD. And Corporate is forcing us to use it.
So today, I was working on an MOC and creating action items, like you do. It’s already convoluted to create action items. You have to go to certain place, select one thing then attach all the action items to it. You can’t use the tab that says “Action Items” because only you will be able to see them. Don’t ask me why it was designed this way.
Either way, I’m getting off topic. I was creating action items, doing the complex steps to document what needs to be done when we do this change and I forget on one action item to change who owns the action. See, the system defaults to tagging the site manager as the owner of all action item created in the system, regardless of who creates them. I have to change it so that I own the action, like I would want. I have no idea who made this decision but, if I ever meet them, Imma slap them right in their face.
Point is, I created an action item for a simple thing and I accidentally assigned the site manager as the owner. I hope he can reassign it to me. Otherwise, I just created so much work for everyone.
Me: “Why the hell are we saddled with this stupid system?”
CEO: “Well the salesman told me it was the best, and the golf club we met at was really nice so…”
Essentially, by pointing out the flaws in an obviously idiotic information system, you are then implying that the boss is an idiot for buying it. Which is probably correct.
The most breathtaking example I remember of that kind of thing is when I worked for the major defense contractor. We had minor-moderate issues with the project accountants getting the accounts set up in time to start projects, so we tended to start work and then update our timecards later, which was expressly forbidden, but no amount of complaining by the project managers could get that fixed. Nobody I knew could figure out why accounting took so long, but that’s a tangent.
So aside from the delays, we had things well in hand when the ivory tower in corporate rolled out a brand new accounting system. They gave the project managers about a month’s notice, and that notice included the choice details that they’d flip us over to the new system on Jan 1st and it would take a little time to get all the account codes converted but “don’t worry”. Don’t worrrryyyyyyy.
It took them more than three months to get new account codes to the project managers, and we couldn’t record our work time against any of our projects during that time. Every PM I knew complained bitterly about how effed up their projects were (financially) because of it. To my knowledge they weren’t forced to go back and fix three month’s worth of timecards or project data, so we just had bad data for one full quarter of the year. And of course all of the PMs had performance reviews based on their project finances. It was awful.
About six months after that, during a lull between projects, I was snooping through the intranet and discovered a corporate newsletter. The main article was about how the CEO and finance team implemented this fantastic new accounting system and what a massive success it was. Gave themselves an award for it, too!
I have a chance to help with a freelance project for a friend, and I’ve been giving her advice… but I’m starting to see how disorganized it is. Buried in a long email (where she kept increasing my role, beyond my skill set) was the phrase “and I don’t know how any of this works”.
Red flag!
As is the fact that in meetings with her, I keep thinking about how I’m going to document the project… for this thread!
Well, everyone was supposed to know this was going to happen because it was announced somewhere or other online at some point. It’s their fault for not being psychic enough to know the clock was running out and that Adobe wouldn’t just stop supporting Flash, it would disable it on all the applications that used it, rendering many of them useless or missing important components.
Adobe announced that Flash support would be dropped by the end of 2020 in July 2017. They reiterated this multiple times afterwards. Developers were certainly informed multiple times in the 2.5 years between the first announcement and the end of life.
Every browser was giving pop-up announcements during 2020 saying that Flash support would be removed by the end of 2020 every time you ran something that used Flash. It might have started earlier than that, but I don’t really remember now.
By the last 6 months of 2020, you had to (at least on Chrome) RENABLE Flash in order to use it every single time you accessed a web site using Flash after every browser restart because it was automatically prevented from running by the browser which also told you, again, that the browsers weren’t going to support it by the end of the year.
Adobe and the various browser providers did the best they could to let everyone know that support for Flash was ending, and they gave everyone 2.5 years to figure out what to do about it. What did you want them to do, knock on the front door of every person in the world to let them know this was going to happen?
There is no way in hell that anyone who used Flash, either as a developer or running something in a browser, did NOT know that Flash support was being dropped.
If you were a company providing products that used Flash, then it was your JOB to know this was happening and if you can honestly claim you weren’t aware of it, you should be fired for gross incompetence.
What the hell IS Flash, anyway? My computer pipes up every couple of hours and offers to update it for me. I keep telling it to remind me later (it has an option for that, but not one to tell it to go away and fuck off. You’d think that you should be able to tell a discontinued, unsupported piece of software to go away and fuck off, wouldn’t you? But here we are).
Flash let you create videos and games that ran in browsers. If you played Farmville on Facebook, for example, that was Flash game.
Why not uninstall it? If you’re on Windows 10, open the Control Panel, click Programs and Features, and find Flash in the list of programs, select it, then click Uninstall.
ETA: @blondebear, it was possible to install Flashplayer separately outside of a browser. @kaylasdad99, it may be telling you to upgrade, but if you actually tried, you wouldn’t be able to.
Example: A web-based user interface for a security camera that I had not bothered with for years because a smartphone app did the job, needed to be used because the app became unreliable. However I found the UI was unusable because Adobe had disabled Flash on it, something I did not know until I wanted to use it.
Surely there were many others with little-used software who didn’t get the word, and then were stuck when there were no updates offered to get around the problem.
I’m on the fourth email of trying to place a simple legal ad, and she just can’t get it right. First she left out part of the ad, then she put it in the wrong place. I don’t think “at the top” is a difficult concept. I sent her another ad, and it confused her because it was very long, and she just couldn’t understand that I wanted to run the whole thing. I’m good at explaining things, but I can’t dumb it down enough for her.
I really don’t think this one is going to happen.