Read your fucking email, you brainless schmucks! (Another SysAdmin Rant)

I am the administrator for the financial systems at my company. We run a old version of a system that is woefully underpowered for the number of users we have on it. Earlier this year we reviewed other systems and, despite my protests, senior management decided to stay with our current system (that’s a rant in and of itself that’ll have to wait until another day).

The first couple of days of every month are always hell, since every financial analyst in the company logs in to print off a bunch of reports that will be three-hold-punched, stuck in a binder on a shelf, and never looked at again. Sometimes, like today, payroll also has to do some serious processing or nobody gets paid. Also, our GL department has to calculate their rates. All this makes the system run so slow that it would almost be worth it to just use pencil and paper. My coworker and I were tasked with finding ways to speed the system up for the people who need it most.

We decided that for the first few business days of each month, the users who were working on their boss’s three-ring binder project would be reduced to having only one screen open at a time. We sent out an email yesterdaythe day before, ran the script, and that was that. Or was it? This morning we had close to 200 emails between us asking why they could only open one screen at a time. I ended up just copying and pasting the email we sent yesterday as the response for every single one of them.

Everyone’s asking why they weren’t given any more notice. Why bother? If we’d told you two weeks ahead of time, you would’ve bitched at us for two weeks and we still would’ve gotten the same number of emails from people who weren’t paying attention. And all your bitching wouldn’t have done any good, since we were still going to go ahead with this. Of course, everyone is an exception since their boss is “leaning on them real hard” to make some deadline. I know how that goes and I can empathize, but I still have to make sure that the most critical processes like payroll (you’d like to get paid, right?) and billing (you’d like us to have money to pay you with, right?) get done. Your earlier mentioned three-ring binder project pales in comparison. Sorry, but that’s just how it is.

Bottom line, if you people would just read your fucking emails, you’d know what was going on and wouldn’t be such clueless schmucks all the time. I’m sorry you’ve been inconvenienced, but take it up with Senior Management for picking such a PoS system.

I hate it when people get pissy because “Oh, I don’t check my e-mail” or “oh, I don’t listen to voicemails.” Then why the hell do you have e-mail and voicemail set up?

Damn, that sounds like when we used to use Hyperion. Our implementation was the slowest piece of crapola I’ve ever used. Bring up a report and set it up to print overnight, and pray. Shorter reports could be printed over lunch, if you were lucky.

Although… if it was just you and your coworker deciding to bump a group of people down the totem pole, and bumping up others, that may not have been appropriate. If you had the proper management signoffs on it, it’s all cool, but I know I’d be pissed if a sysadmin decided that my jobs were less important than someone elses.

Similar rant, but for a different reason.

We email customers invoices every month showing them the amount they’re paying, plus any excess and we also give them a wee bit of info about the plan they’re on (the rest they can find out by :eek: logging into the main webpage).

The amount of customers who cuss me out each day because they’ve been charged an excess, because they haven’t bothered reading the emails they’ve been sent each month for the last 2 years, that tell them they only have x hours available each month, is astronomical.

You’ve been on the same plan for 2 years now, dumbass. Why would you suddenly have three hundred and fifty hours available when you’ve only ever had one hundred and twenty in the past?

We presented the idea to our VP, and she loved it. It’s not a perfect fix, but things are running much smoother and we’re not constantly bumping up against our license limit like we were this time last month.