04 February, 2007

Accounting, Ted E.-style

One of the sources of stress for my manager over recent months has been the wild fluctuations in the money available in our sections accounts. Part of this was due to the money laundering that was taking place, and upper management helping themselves to our funds when they needed a little extra for other projects elsewhere, but both practices were more or less brought under control when upper management discovered they'd been found out.

But the fluctuations continued, and money continued to inexplicably drain away. Until yesterday...

We're looking at a new function in our tracking and purchasing system. Ted E. looks over my shoulder and points to an account number.

"That's wrong. It always keeps coming up with that number when I'm doing the accounts, and it's wrong."

Manager and 2iC look at each other. "Uh, that's our account name, Ted. It's been that for nearly eighteen months now."

"Oh, really? I've just been changing it so the money goes to these other accounts where I think it belongs."

"For eighteen months?"

"Well nobody told me..."

"Eighteen months, Ted! You thought there was a bug in the system for eighteen months and didn't say anything?"

"Welll ... it was just easier to do it this way and not tell anyone that I was siphoning money off to other accounts..."

The Learning Cliff

Manager (in search of Ted E.): "Where is he? Has he gone home already?"

Me: "Well it is ten past three..."

Manager looks at me, trying to tell if I'm joking.

"Did he tell anyone he was planning to leave early?"

Remaining workmate and I confer briefly. "Yes ... yes, he did. At about quarter to three."

"Oh. I needed to ask him about something. There's also an e-mail I needed to talk to the two of you about, following on from what we were discussing earlier ... only now I can't find it."

"It's been filed!" I pronounce ominously. Ted E. has taken to filing e-mails, using a hidden formula known only to himself and Dan Brown.

"No, it hasn't," says our manager, "That's what I thought, too, but I tried a global search and it didn't turn up."

The global search apparently doesn't encompass the "deleted" folder, because that's where I find it a few minutes later.

"Found it," I announce cheerfully.

"Where? No, don't tell me." There's a pinched look of pain on my manager's face that I haven't seen before, but which is oddly familiar from the Cow-orker workplace. "I think I need to talk to Ted E. about this in the morning."

My manager hasn't so much hit the Ted E. learning curve as smacked straight into the Ted E. cliff-face.

A pointy-haired moment

Argh.

Manager: "When I told you to contact these people, I meant 'contact these people, plus another unspecified group'. Did you read my mind, and have you heard from the unspecified group yet?"

Me: "Er... no."

Manager: "Then I think you need to get on with that urgently."

In an ideal world.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that if you're going to insist other parts of the organisation turn over all their activities in a particular area to your management, that you'd make sure beforehand that if you didn't already have the means of managing that task properly, you acquired it pretty damned quickly and made sure you were able to deliver on what you were promising.

You'd think...

Ted E., Man of Action

The two beliefs that drive Ted E. at work are: give the client what they want, and act immediately.

Unfortunately this tends to fall down tragically when:
  1. what the client wants isn't what they need or are entitled to;
  2. Ted E. doesn't understand what the client wants;
  3. Ted E. doesn't actually read the client's email and acts immediately to give them what he thinks they want.
Hi-jinx ensue.

Thinking outside the box ... way outside...

Oh dear. Ted E. has been "thinking outside the box" in a bid to get out of doing work that requires engaging brain cells.

"I know doing it this way is more secure and more accurate, but can't we go for convenience instead so I don't have to spend twenty seconds looking up a database to verify confidential information?"

Data consistency is for lesser beings...

Argh. I'm glad that's over with for now.

I've just finished (I think) doing some data cleanup to fix the problem of half-a-dozen products being erroneously labeled with around 30-odd different combinations. That just sounds painful, rather than difficult, so throw in the fact that the software vendor restructured its licensing and sales model twice over that period and youll start to get an idea of how "interesting" the task turned out to be.

And then consider that the next time Ted E. goes into the database, he'll look at what I've done, decide it's too hard to understand and that consistency of data within a database is only a guideline (and a loose one at that), and begin creating new and wonderful product descriptions all over again...

Holy Wars: the Innate Superiority of The Mac

Let me just preface this by saying first that I really don't care what type of computer people use as long as it gets the job done. However...

A co-worker uses a Mac. Up until yesterday he also had to use a PC, because while his Mac could run the Microsoft Access application critical to much of our work (provided he was running a virtual Windows machine), it couldn't connect to the Oracle database that sat behind the Access front-end.

So he ran both a PC and a Mac to get around this, until yesterday when he, a tech, and a senior tech spent two hours trying to establish a connection to a database. Eventually it succeeded, but at a conservative estimate the exercise cost somewhere in the vicinity of $200 to $300. That's purely in terms of wages, and doesn't take into account the things they didn't do during that time because they were concentrating on getting one Mac to duplicate the functions of an existing Windows machine.

All good now, though? Well, no, because now he has to get Lotus Notes working properly under the virtual Windows machine, because otherwise he has to deal with the Lotus web interface and its various idiosyncrasies. But at least now he's down to using only one computer (most of the time), and after another couple of hundred dollars in salaries are consumed, he might be able to do everything he wants on his Mac.

By running all the critical systems through a virtual Windows machine.

Stupidity and The War On Me

I believe I may have to kill Ted E. shortly. The system we use here is set up with a product-prices hierarchy - that is, the database (you knew this was going to involve databases at some point, didn't you?) contains a record for a particular product, with sub-records that reflect the different models under which it can be ordered, e.g. single user, 5-user etc.

I discovered a couple of weeks back that there was a particular product suite that was proving difficult to track because Ted E. had created it as a subset of another product from the same company (a quick analogy would be listing Microsoft Office as being a subset of Microsoft Word). I tried to convince him not to do this because it wasn't just contrary to how the database is supposed to work, it's just plain wrong. But he didn't want to change it, because that requires a lot messing about to update all the records.

So I create new product entires in the database to match what the orders should be, so he can use it for future reference (he wasn't interested in trying to understand the way the products were sold, so I had to set them up myself - no big problem, because at least that way I know they're done right).

Now I find the ignorant bugger is still doing it, "because that's how I did it last time". In other words, it's more convenient for him if he keeps entering incorrect data rather than apply a little brain power - not a lot, just selecting something from a drop-down list - and do it right.

And I know when I take this to him shortly and explain again what's gone wrong, two things will happen:
  • he'll react with injured innocence and repeat that he's just ordering it how it's always been ordered, and if we get the right stuff in the end, what's the harm?
  • my blood pressure will soar, and I'll be fighting the urge to break office furniture over his head.

Cow-orker: the energizer bunny of stupidity

Cow-orker to an e-mail list reaching a dozen or so separate organisations:

"Hi everyone. We've received some documents under a non-disclosure agreement that we're concerned about. What do you think?"

And, sure enough, two of the three documents attached to the e-mail are clearly marked as being under NDA, not for circulation outside of vendor-controlled forums, etc.

This comes only a couple of months after she placed confidential vendor information on a publicly-accessible website because it was easier than relaying the information directly to the individuals affected by it.

The Crazy Man Revisited

Ten days ago a call went out on a closed, inter-organisational e-mail list asking for participants in a trial programme. Over the next day or two, a small handful volunteered to be guinea-pigs.

This morning the Crazy Man finally sends through his response. "Sorry for the late reply," he begins, "but I'm in a conference in Sydney and they're having trouble getting the wireless network connected..."

And the thing is - I'm not sure whether this is just a lame excuse (because even he can't pull off ten days of consecutive conference time), or if what he's making a Freudian slip and telling everyone he only replied at all because he isn't able to web-surf right now...

Cow-orker: you can lead a cow-orker to water ...

... but it's still illegal to drown them.*

"I want to send an e-mail to everyone saying they need to stop using this product and switch to products that I say are okay!"

"Wouldn't you rather just tell them they need to consider alternatives to the current product, and not get flamed by the users?"

"Um ... no, I don't think so. My way is better."


* From the archives.

So, yeah... I'm back.

The World of Warcraft ate my life. Sorry. Now back to the other things that eat my life, but are far less fun and can't be resolved by hitting them with a broadsword (except on a very temporary basis).