28 September, 2010

The Virtual Monday Blues

Dear clients,
  • if your dog has just died; and,
  • if you've just had root-canal work; and,
  • you're about to fly overseas and want to give a presentation developed using the expensive and esoteric piece of Windows-based software you had us buy for your work computer; and,
  • you've just gone and bought yourself a new Mac laptop especially for the trip...
You may want to reconsider ringing me and expecting me to be able to solve all your problems. Because, and this my considered, professional opinion: you're f**ked, and will soon come to envy your dead dog and your zombie tooth.

(And if you really must call to recite your catalogue of woe, please present it an appropriate format - a nice, blues number by John Lee Hooker, for instance.

21 September, 2010

Freaks. All of them.

My workplace is always full of strange smells. Usually unpleasant, often chemical in origin, and only a health hazard about a third of the time. Sometimes, I'm assuming for the sake of variety, we're afflicted with various burning smells. Mostly these consist of woodsmoke from burn-offs in the nearby forest reserves, plastic containers that people have (somehow!) managed to immolate in the tea-room microwaves and, very occasionally, from workmen setting fire to things beneath the air-conditioning intakes. In fact the air-conditioning intakes seem to be a popular spot to work: just last week some workers chose that very spot to use industrial solvent to clean their paintbrushes.

Hilarity ensued, as you can imagine.

There's a peculiar odor hanging around at the moment, and it's one of Ted's days off so it's definitely not him. The Stress Fiend and La Mondaine have been discussing it at length, and La Mondaine has concluded it's the smell of burning wiring. I'm skeptical, because it was only the other week she thought her wooden computer was on fire, but she's now prowling the office and stooping to sniff all the network ports in the belief that our internet has somehow caught fire.

15 September, 2010

How many nemeses does one person need?

A manager - for the sake of a name let's call him Mr Bonehead, because I'm not feeling particularly creative with aliases right now - received an invoice and then sat on it for a fortnight before passing it through to us with only eight working days left in which to have payment authorised and processed.  Plenty of time, you might think, considering it's not a huge amount (a little over $100,000) and we live in an age of digital wonders*, but the labyrinthine approvals process and (let's be honest) some seriously  f***ed-up financial delegation levels make this a much more challenging process than could reasonably be expected. At the best of times, eight working days would be barely be adequate.

Mr Bonehead finally sent the invoice through to The Invertebrate, asking him to organise payment. The Invertebrate left it on my desk (I was away the day it arrived) with a note asking me to organise payment (at least partly, I suspect, because The Invertebrate still hasn't quite learnt how to use our systems). This is on a Friday, so suddenly we're already at the end of a working week.

The next week kicked off with everyone but me away for the first half of the week. This is less stressful than it sounds, but getting things moving doesn't happen easily. Nevertheless, I get the purchase request up to the Director's office to kick off the approval chain. It's beyond his meagre financial delegation of $50,000, but he still needs to see it before it goes to the next level of management for their approval ... except that it's also beyond their level of delegation, but they have to see it before it goes on to the level after that, where someone can finally rubber-stamp the renewal of a critical bit of IT infrastructure support.

Except that the Director is the one who has to approve the use of the particular account this is to be paid from, and even though it's been paid from this account every year since its inception, he decides that now he wants to know more about it. I provide a brief cover letter with all the relevant details I can lay my hands on, which aren't many because it turns out this particular contract has been administered with a high degree of secrecy over the years. So he sends the whole thing back down to Mr Bonehead asking him what it's about.

In the meantime, the company we're trying to pay has been ringing Mr Bonehead to see how things are going. Then they ring Finance, who also call Mr Bonehead and ask if it's okay to pay.

"Sure," he tells them. And then tells them to forward any other inquiries about it straight to me.

Finance try to pay the invoice on the say-so of someone who doesn't have the authority to approve a payment of that size or from that account, only to discover - surprise! - that there's nothing in their system they can match it against so they can proceed. At which point they email me in confusion and ask me to submit a payment request (in addition to the purchase request that's already ricocheting around somewhere in the building). I figure I may as well, because the money has to be paid and this might save us some time.

Except - there's that word again - I can't submit a payment request without a financial approver, which just starts me down exactly the same path as getting the purchase request authorised. Only this time, because that particular workflow is hardcoded to only recognise its own version of Inner Truth, our wonderful financial system won't let me pick a financial approver anywhere to whom I can send this thing.

If I drew this as a flowchart, it would probably end up stabbing itself in the head to stop the pain.

I give The Invertebrate an update on what's going on and then throw up my hands, having been effectively stymied at every turn.

A week or so later the saga rears its head again with no-one listening to a word anyone else is saying, least of all anything I might have to say.

The supplier is becoming more insistent that the invoice be paid today ("Kindly refer to our previous correspondence re. claiming firstborn in lieu of payment"), emailing and calling me constantly while simultaneously harassing our finance area ... who are also emailing and calling me constantly. Our Finance Trolls are being particularly annoying, as I've now had to repeat the same story to several different people because none of them write anything down or communicate anything to their teammates. Or maybe they do, and they just prefer to start from first principles every time. Who can tell? Their ways are not those of normal folk.

Anyway, with time running out I began chasing the Director's PA to see if they knew where the payment authorisation had gone because I certainly didn't. They did some forensic work at their end and discovered...

[Drum roll!]

... Mr Bonehead was sitting on it again. Had been, in fact, since the moment he received it from the Director asking what it was about.

Asked if he could bring it back so we could get on with paying it, he responded "Oh, but it hasn't been signed yet." So he knew payment was actually dependent on it being signed, but never thought it might be useful to send it back to someone who could sign off on something he wanted paid urgently.

After sitting on it for a fortnight at the start.


* Although this normally translates into people wondering how to extract their digits from various orifices.

02 September, 2010

His reputation precedes him

A tech wanders into our area: "I've got a tricky question. Who wants it?"

I point to Ted, sitting with his back to us and facing studiously into his corner.

Several minutes later we've revived the tech after he passes out from laughing too hard, and he tries again: "No, seriously..."

01 September, 2010

Kill it with fire?

"Oh, there's that burning smell again! What is it? What's on fire? Where's it coming from?"

"It's woodsmoke. From outside."

"But how do you know?"

"I was outside at lunchtime, and I could smell it then."

"But how do you know it's woodsmoke?"

"... because the air is smoky, and smells of burning wood?"

"Since when? When did this start?"

"It's been like that all day. When I left to come here this morning there was a blanket of smoke over the suburb where we both live."*

"But how can you tell it's wood?"

I'm trying to think of a polite way of not bothering to even answer this when the Stress Fiend comes to my rescue: "Because he went out into the forest and set it on fire! What do you think?"

"Oh, so it's a burn-off. Is it a burn-off? Are they having a burn-off? Where? Where can you find out?"

"I don't know." (Although actually it was more like "Hnn-nnh" accompanied by an indifferent shrug in the hope she'd leave me alone.)

"How can I be sure it's a burn-off? How do I know it's not my computer?"

I don't know. Maybe because your computer isn't made of wood?


* Yes, alarmingly enough that's true. Presumably for sins in a past life, La Mondaine lives only a couple of streets away from me. Since discovering that, leaving the house during daylight hours has taken on a hitherto-unknown dimension of terror.