Somebody is getting TDY on the Big Island.
“We need a list of all of the places data comes from and how it gets to your (Fortune 50) Enterprise Data Warehouse. By Friday.”
Fuck off. Just fuck right off. I don’t think there’s anyone in this entire company who could provide you this information and it would take a seriously major project to gather it. You’d have people all the way up to the CEO asking why the fuck you needed that kind of information and what you intended to do with it. Especially since you are not even remotely connected to the administration or governance of that warehouse.
I mean, seriously, do people even THINK about what they’re asking for before they make these kinds of requests?
Early Retirement Program.
No they do not. Neither do the people who send me emails that say, “cannot access system help plz!” No, don’t bother specifying where you have a problem or send a screenshot or anything. I didn’t spend that week and a half building cerebro here for you to waste another 30 seconds typing.
edit: My guess is enterprise resource planning
Apparently… I didn’t even know the company had assets that far out!
One of our purchasing agents recently emailed such a request to my supervisor. This fellow wanted the complete history of some obscure pump we occasionally supply, including which customers had purchased the pump since 2000, how many pumps they purchased, and what purchase order numbers were associated with these pumps. He also wanted drawings of this pump and its replacement, along with an extensive analysis of why the new pump would be acceptable. The email also included a vague threat that the VP of our division would be contacted if the requested materials are not supplied.
Never mind that the drawings can’t be released because of their proprietary nature, or the fact that my department’s access to purchase history in the system doesn’t go back that far…
Sounds like it’s time for his boss to have a talk with him!
And if the boss is timid, like many of them. it’s up to you and some other recipients of this guy’s ‘solutions’ to encourage the boss to ‘counsel’ him.
If this guy was really as nicce as you think, he would have offered to let the employees buy the company first.
All joking aside, it stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. Which is technically a method, but usually refers to a software package/platform. Nava is a consultant who specializes in some facet of ERP implementation.
It’s a rather tough nut, because
(A) It’s critical to about half the people in any given company.
(B) It has to deal with a lot of legacy data and systems which may not sync up properly.
(C) There’s an array of people who don’t want to give up some moronic, outmoded service or tool and frequently make other departments do the work to support their backwards views about how things work. (These people are called “Accountants”.)
(D) These days, they often have to automatically and quickly move data while pointing out odd situations or alerting users to the odd regulations.
(E) They have to be flexible enough so people can use them as practical tools.
(F) There’s a constant tension between flexibility and precision.
Plus entire hosts of problems specific to industries or business models that might not exist for other industries or business models.
In MMORPGs, “ERP” means, “Erotic RolePlay” 
That was one of the best explanations I’ve seen, smiling bandit.
One detail about point C, though: while the Accountants do tend to be the most change-resistant group in any implementation, the backwards facing ones can be about anybody. I once had a project where the worst one for that was our team manager, the person whose job consists of “making sure the consultants don’t all run in different directions and convincing the clients that This Change Will Be Good For You”.
She was… neither my favourite boss nor a particularly efficient one.
Out of time:
I like telling my clients that the system is “the biggest excel sheet ever”. The instant anybody enters a piece of data, anyone who needs it can use it. I’ve had clients who were smiling from ear to ear within hours of going live because “someone from [another department] just called asking me to print out a report for him and I told him the page in his manuals where it’s explained how to use it :D” No more printing out reports for your neighbor, if he needs them he has access.
This means it can save a lot of time on data entry, so long as things have been set up right. Very often managers (and the higher on, the more prone to this) want people to input data that nobody will look up. If your “blue minions” spend more than half an hour a day reporting, you’re doing it wrong!
Look, customer, a policy does NOT have to make sense to you to be the policy.
Telling me to summon my manager-- either department or store manager-- so you can badger them does not endear you to me.
It has been a long two weeks, and I had fifteen minutes to go until the end of my shift.
And the manager on duty has my back-- he may not make the same choices I would regarding selling the product you NEEDED, but he’ll understand why I was maybe a little snippy.
I love it when people want to talk to my manager. *Especially *when they want to talk to the General Manager (Big Boss). The entire back office gathers around the corner to see how Big Boss will devour them.
We recently moved to a new temporary location while our new building is under construction. The powers that be apparently thought that our new building would be built by now and went ahead and leased out the old building. The new building just had groundbreaking and due to too may delays to list here won’t be done until 2016.
So we’re all crammed into this temporary space. It’s not awful, there’s a lot more windows than the old building, but we are kind of like sardines in there. I’m sitting next to our resident Loud Howard. He’s a great person, I really do like him, but HE HAS NO INSIDE VOICE. I can hear him through my earbuds. And he’s always on the phone. Some days he gives me quite the headache.
My biggest gripe about the temporary location, however, is the lack of bathroom space. There’s maybe 150 of us, probably 110 are women. Five bathroom stalls. Five. And one was out of order last week. The powers that be are of course some of the male minority and I’m sure they didn’t think anything of it. God help you if you have some sort of intestinal emergency or something.
So this is getting kind of funny. One of the managers who depends on my work is convinced that my departure is going to be the end of the world, and has been badgering my boss’s boss, via email, about what is being done. My boss’s boss is dodging and weaving and passing the buck, and this other manager isn’t having any of it. He keeps asking for specific information, and timetables, and whatnot. And he’s copying me on all the emails. I’m loving it. And, in fact, some things are finally being arranged, although some other things are still going to go undone, but what’s funny is that she (my boss’s boss) doesn’t know what is or isn’t being done, because she can’t be bothered to find out. And the beat goes on, 12 weeks to go.
I hope you are quietly slipping information to this manager. He sounds like one they need more like him.
Today wasn’t a horrible day as days go, but by the time I left, I was ready to lock all the members of management in a small room until they came up with a plan they could all agree on-- preferably a plan that did NOT involve moving significant quantities of furniture multiple times.
Also, all of the members of management need to take a chill pill, probably daily, until the remodel is complete.
Remodel isn’t officially started yet, but the prep work is getting really close.
Oh, and while I’m griping.
Customers-- remember, when bargain hunting, one does not neccessarily get a matched set of anything. But just because you want a matched set doesn’t mean we can’t sell individual items to other people.
And Co-worker: Next time, ask someone to write your adjusted schedule on the wall schedule, please. None of us begrudge you earning overtime at your other job, but this morning was a time when we could really have used you present first thing in the morning, not whenever you wandered in mid-afternoon.
Someone at my workplace just fell for a big-assed scam and cost her company a lot of money.
I don’t work for the company in question, but the guy that owns that company is a partner in my small business and I share office space with them.
I always thought that the salesperson that fell for this one is a big old idiot – someone that has no “big picture” idea of what she is doing or what her role in the company is. She’s always happy to tell you how professional she is and what a marvelous work ethic she has but no one else has seen any evidence of it. She often cries at work because she is so unappreciated. And she once wrote her boss a letter complaining that her ego was not being sufficiently stroked by her coworkers for possessing all these professional superpowers. She included attachments with the letter of ego-stroking e-mails allegedly sent to her during her previous employment with the note – “This is how I’m used to being treated”. And I totally cringe whenever I listen to her take phone calls, she once took a call from a well-known industry professional whose first name is the same as his last name and the dialogue was something like “James James? You’re kidding, right? Is that really your name? Really? Your real name? What a funny name. Is that the name your parents gave you?" I really wanted to pop a bullet through her skull right there to save the company from further professional embarrassment.
But I digress……………………
Miss Thing took a call from a guy that wanted to buy a large quantity of industrial grade exterior lighting equipment. He got her to bury herself in the technical details of working out transformers and power supplies and whatnot…………and, oh, by the way…….they need all this heavy stuff shipped to New Zealand. But she doesn’t need to worry about that because they have this freight forwarder that they always use. She just needs to call them at this number and get a quote for the shipping and add the charges to the invoice.
Of course, Miss Thing is blinded by her fantasy of all the dollar signs on her big commission check and never thinks to wonder why they are buying all this stuff in New York City to light up a parking lot in New Zealand, even though it will cost 10K in shipping alone. She never asks the client how they heard of her company or why they chose her to grace with this huge order of stuff they could’ve bought anywhere. She never thinks to call the export company that is allegedly placing this order at their listed landline number and verify that John Smith actually works there and that they are actually placing this order. She never questions the fact that the e-mails are coming from weird gmail accounts like 7#5rfg3mg4@gmail.com instead of accounts with the appearance of being connected to the company placing the order. She just takes the credit card payments and then wire transfers $10,000 to the bank account given to her by the freight forwarder for shipping charges.
Of course, the “freight forwarder” is a confederate and the credit card payments are fraudulent. The absolute kicker is that this “consummate professional” allowed the customer to split the roughly 30K total payment over about a dozen credit cards that were all in different names, and the double-down kicker is that she actually tried running over 35 credit card numbers total in order to find ones that weren’t declined.
And the real pitting here is for my friend, her boss………….because I will go into work today and she will still be employed. And her sense of entitlement is so huge that she sees herself personally as the victim here…………she isn’t thinking about the money the company lost. She isn’t thinking about the barrage of calls the accounting team is fielding from people whose cards were charged fraudulently and the credit card companies and criminal investigations.
No, her thoughts are that “It could’ve happened to anyone and I wasted a lot of my time on this order so even if I don’t get the full commission I should get something”
REALLY?? Yes REALLY !!! And she’s still employed. Go figure.
Not even 11 A.M. and somebody already burned popcorn in the microwave. How fucking hard is it to nuke a bag of popcorn – and if you’re that dumb, how are you still employed?
One place I worked there was a woman who burned her popcorn* on purpose*. She was asked and then told to stop doing that. “But I *like *it that way!” she whined.