We have a timesheet system at work so that we allocate all of our time in case some of it is billable back to a client. Of course not everything is billable back to a client.
Every entry must have a comment with it, which is useful if you’re billing it back to the client so that they know what they’re being billed for if they bother to look at it with a fine-toothed comb. Even the internal ones need a comment, too. That comment must be at least five characters long. Took a half-day; “OOO” (Out of office) or “PTO” (paid time off) aren’t acceptable entries. Given it’s already in a bucket of ‘PTO’ how much more detail do they need? If it’s internal, which has multiple buckets do we really need a comment as well, especially for PTO?
It’s not that it’s so tough to do but it’s very short sighted & piss poor programming (& this is some software that we bought/leased). Every entry needs a comment of at least 5-chara.
At a highest level, things fall into two buckets internal or external (working on a client project). Internal then further breaks down to ‘leave’ & all of the subcategories thereof - PTO, sick, bereavement, funeral, military, jury duty, etc. If they know I’m out & the reason that I’m out by the bucket why then does it need any comments?
That some company built software that is this poor when that is their whole reason for being is a bit surprising. It wasn’t worth starting a pit thread on it’s own, per se; it just happened to be the first of the month & no one else had yet created a new mini-rants.
How fixed is the software, though? It is possible that both the requirement for comments and the specific buckets are settings controlled by some genius in HR.
In my (pretty extensive) experience, software like that is rarely if ever something off-the-shelf. It’s usually made for an organization that’s looking for software that can do something that’s not available from a regular commercial vendor so it’s made in-house or is custom made for them by contractors who cobble together something proprietary. That’s how you end up with such weird quirks.
To make matters worse, it often has some weird dependencies that then hold you back and force you to use an old, unsupported web browser or clumsy emulator to run it, and upgrading/migrating it is insanely difficult or impossible because nobody who designed it is around anymore and it wasn’t made using best practices or other standards, and is difficult to deconstruct or reverse engineer. Nor is the data easily exported or transferred.
They are the gifts that keep on giving. Like herpes.
Well, I have an update from the doctor about my maybe having a viable pregnancy.
It not viable, it seems. My hCG came back the same as last Thursday. Next step is yet another blood test tomorrow morning to make sure the levels are going down.
I feel stupid for being so sad about this. But I am really fucking sad. This really sucks.
I’ve mostly been avoiding my feelings with interruptions of weepiness. I burst into tears when I saw my husband after work. So it’s gonna be a real good day tomorrow when I go back to the doctor for a final blood draw to make sure I’m miscarrying like normal. I will definitely cry. Then I get to go to work and try to be productive like a normal, not sad human.
This is a huge ball of suck. I hate every part of it.
ETA - thanks for the hugs though. It actually is comforting.
You have been trying to have a baby. You and your husband obviously very badly want a child. And in one day you learned that something you wanted very badly had maybe happened but had happened in such a way that you probably wouldn’t have it after all, and then a few days later you learned that it definitely had happened and was already unhappening and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. Frankly, I’m astonished you can form coherent thoughts, much less type sentences, right now.
Is there any chance you can take a day or two off to process? Talk to a counselor?
