I bring this up again because we have an regulatory audit next week. I had to gather data from MOCs for this audit and it made me want to stab someone - Preferably the designer of the system but, honestly, anyone within reach would have been fair game. They made no part of it easy. The whole point of centralizing the data is so that I can make pretty reports when its audit time. But no, I couldn’t.
SO BAD!
No problem, and don’t feel obliged - just thought you might want to vent at some point!
We’re hosting an online course this summer. The faculty are supposed to pre-record lectures for the students,
The 10 1-2 hour pre-recorded videos were due last Friday. I only received two 8 minute clips.
Each faculty member is only responsible for one lecture. Each faculty member is going to be paid several thousand for their work. All of the lectures are on topics the faculty have taught before, so they can mostly recycle old material. None of them cared enough to get it done on time.
So, instead of some edited videos, with hand corrected captioning, the students are going to get raw video with error filled machine generated captioning, because there is no way there will be time to clean up everything.
I had to check your location - just to see if you work where I do (you don’t, but I sure feel for ya, BTDT).
I’ve ranted about this before, but I’m repeating because it happened again…I had to explain to a quality inspector how to measure a dimension on a part. They weren’t confused about how to take the measurement…they didn’t understand what dimension was being called out on the drawing. 
I had to explain that the dimension needed to be taken from the center of one feature to another. And more than once this year I’ve had to explain how to interpret the multiple part views on engineering drawings. I’ve seen the job description for the quality inspector position; “Ability to read and interpret engineering drawings” is one of the first requirements.
That made me think of the shopping trip I just got home from…
Not my workplace, but Dudley McDoofer’s. He was the twenty-ish hippie checkout clerk I dealt with today, who admitted “I just don’t get coins, man…”
He had to give me 81¢ back. He picked up many coins from the tray in the register, stared at them and let them slip back. I finally said “Three quarters, a nickel and a penny.” He was genuinely confused: “THREE? Are you sure?” I wondered if he was used to bills, where it’d be four twenties to make eighty, so I said “Yeah, a quarter’s 25¢, so three of them make 75, then add a nickel to get to eighty, then a penny!” I said it like “Isn’t that cool?” Then, since he was staring at me now, I felt like I had to add “Look, trust me, I used to be a teacher…”
“Dude, coinage is like… complex.”
Reminds of a grocery run I made several years ago.
The clerk looked at my groceries, saw a six pack of beer and requested ID. I obliged. Clerk then looked at my drivers license with confusion and pulled out a calculator.
I was 56 at the time. Also, the beer was non-alcoholic.
Due to the occasional insanity of state legislatures, in my state non-alcoholic beer is treated exactly like alcoholic beer for purposes of sale - minimum age requirement, limited Sunday sales, and all. Yeah, lots of fun - really, folks, it’s not MY idea or stupidity, if you don’t like it please write your representative in Indianapolis to get some sanity injected into the laws. Thank you.
So today we all received a corporate email asking us to join an event whereby the CEO of some company that makes sunglasses is going to lecture us all about making work FUN! Oh allow me to correct myself, they dont make sunglasses, “we sell fun, not eyewear!”
You know what would make work fun, a meaningful data storage strategy. Ok it wouldn’t make it fun but at least pull it back a bit from the current eyeball stabbing levels of misery caused by the a total lack of a coherent strategy on what to do with data. IT banned servers storage in a traditional file structure for reasons, and said everything should be on Box. So we end up having massive amounts of engineering project data and stupendous amounts of client well site data all in personal , but shares box folders. Then they decide to migrate from box to One drive, but to sync everything you had to sync to your own computer , then resync to one drive all over VPN which is slower than a one legged duck in the 100m hurdles. If your local hard drive wasn’t large enough to sync it all then you had to go to the back up plan, see below. If the folders had been owned by someone else who had left but you became the owner, then you also had to go to the back up plan as the owner could not be changed you just became a co owner , so could not sync the normal way.
The back up was to download directly to you own computer as zip files, but directories greater than a gig could not be zipped so you had to go and zip all the sub directories finding ones that were small enough then download over vpn hoping you got everything and could reassemble back in the correct order. Oh and zip file uploads are not allowed to one drive.
Anyway after many days of pain and anguish we now are uploading it all to one drive which will only repeat the problem as everything is basically shared personal one drive space rather than a managed space, so if anyone leaves , we have the same shit of managing data again. All this from a company that claims to be leading the oilfield digital revolution.
Think I will take a hint from Zaphod Beeblebrox and just get some very very dark sunglasses and hope it all goes away.
I look forward to my weeks when I work from home; it’s relaxing to get away from the stupid for a little while.
Then the stupid showed up in my inbox this afternoon in the form of an order. It seems that, despite the copious amount of notes I entered into the system after the last kerfuffle, our customer service agent proceeded exactly as they did for the previous order, resulting in our purchasing agent trying to purchase a widget for Customer A with the special factory testing required for Customer B. Fortunately, the vendor knows us very well, and provided pricing for both the super-special widget and the regular widget.
Yikes. I have a theory that incompetent people are making all of the decisions now. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
Might we consider some ALPHA testing before inflicting the role of BETA tester on employees who are already wrangling callers without having to cope with unreliable mandatory software? Damn thing crashed on me about once an hour, on average, and my peers were having similar results.
Taking a break from bitching about tech…
Yesterday, when it came time to pay for groceries, this old guy opens his wallet, pulls down his mask, and very generously loads up the fingers of his hands with saliva then, despite my request for him to stop what he’s about to do, starts riffling through his cash with his contaminated fingers.
At which point I have to say “I’m sorry sir, but because you licked your fingers then touched your money we can not accept your payment in cash”.
At which point he says “what… you’re SERIOUS?”
Yes, yes, we are. We are very serious about this. My company has not only had well over half its workforce out on medical leave at one point or another this year, costing the company tens of millions of dollars, we have also had a number of people die this year from transmissible disease. I didn’t explain all this to the gentleman standing there, but I did say that yes, we are serious, we are not taking cash contaminated with saliva.
“But I’ve had both my shots! I can’t give anyone covid!”
>sigh< No, I did not attempt to educate this person about how a vaccinated person can still potentially transmit covid, or how his spit on the money can transfer pathogens to may fingers and thence to anything I touch unless I sanitize immediately, and how his spit-touched money will contaminate any other money it comes into contact in my drawer, then anyone else coming into contact with that money later…
I just said “I’m sorry sir, we are no longer able to accept cash that had bodily fluids on it”.
Sure, he gets angry. I’m being unreasonable (he wasn’t quite so polite about saying that) and he just storms off, leaving all his stuff behind. Which actually wasn’t all bad - anything he had tried to unload at that point we would have had to throw out as damaged due to contamination but by just leaving it without the addition of spit at least the non-perishables could be re-shelved.
I didn’t hear everything he said on the way out the door, but “I’m never coming back here!” would not surprise me. GOOD. Fuck you, asshole, you self-entitled privileged asshole. We do not want you. Fuck people who don’t give a shit about putting the health and lives of other people at risk.
I don’t care if you’ve been licking your fingers to separate money for the past 8 decades or whatever - STOP DOING IT! It was never acceptable, but these days it’s very much not acceptable, to the point stores no longer want your business if you can’t grow the fuck up and learn hygiene.
Yeah. The pandemic has made me think about all the ways I used to be cavalier about such things. I quickly stopped licking the envelopes on the notecards in my orders and just use a 1-inch piece of tape instead. I’ll keep doing that because… even dried, they’re still body fluids.
I get to revise the report containing our inspection/test requirements for this assembly AGAIN, because Og forbid we expect our vendors to read and follow the requirements of the fucking drawings. 
Also, Quality Guy: you just reviewed this report, and now
you’re deciding that we should modify our testing requirements? This is becoming a trend with you and my reports, and I don’t like it one damn bit.
YES!!! Despite all the maskholery in my workplace, the pandemic has had the effect of eliminating the nasty lick-and-page-flip behavior.
Well our IT has just out done themselves, with a windows update they pushed out that stopped MS office working , so just imagine there is a rant here involving vitriol, spittle, your favorite colorful swearey words and suggestions of where things can be inserted. I’ll be sobbing into my cup of tea.
That sounds somewhat like when someone in our corporate IT decided that 2 pm Sunday afternoon was a really good time to institute a corporation-wide shutdown, update, and reboot of every single cash register in every single store. Because who works on a Sunday, right?
Have I mentioned we’re a grocery store and Sunday is our second biggest days of the week for revenue?
Not fun.
Another software update rant: last week, a mandatory piece of call handling software got major updates that apparently had had virtually no testing, based on crash frequency. This week, it’s somewhat more stable (down from at least 6 crashes/day for me to about 2), but they’ve added more “features” that actually just get in the user’s way and slow down call handling.
At the same time, the screeching about how we mustn’t take so much as a second per call more than bare minimum is reaching new heights. The howling about metrics has me feeling like fast-food drivethroughs are more relaxed and friendlier than my PHBs want to allow.
I really need to find another job.
As a worker at a cash-only business, I can only say … MY GOD I wish my employers held this kind of a hard line. Bravo to your employers for being willing to lose a sale over the issue.
Of course, he just stuck those icky bills back in his wallet and spent them somewhere else.
The better action would have been: Call Store Security over on a CodeRED, and when they arrive in their full space suits, they confiscate those poisoned bills and burn them on the spot!