More Work Related Stupidness
My boss was off today as was her evil troll henchwoman so I thought, I'd be able to have a nice chilled out day reading the Interwebs without any hassle.
But oh no! It wasn't to be.
One of my colleagues, we'll call Ms Miserable, because that's her general demeanour, has recently been caught out talking a good game but not actually doing a slightest stich of fucking work. So today in order to try and cover up her uselessness she decided to harrass me this morning by trying to get me to do some work which would make it look like she had done some fucking work.
This was the conversation I had this morning.
Ms Miserable: There are some jobs on the support log, can I do them?
rm-rf: Do you know how to do them?
Ms Miserable: Well, can you show me how to do them?
rm -rf: No, I can't, that one is a coding problem and the others have already been sorted.
Ms Miserable: I know C#.
rm -rf: And?
Ms Miserable: You can show me where the code is and I'll have a look.
rm -rf: Fuck off.
Ms Miserable: I've been on a course.
Ms Miserable: Look I'm offerering to do some of your work for you.
rm -rf: No, you are causing me work, I'd have to spend over an hour explaining it to you
Ms Miserable: Come on.
rm -rf: No, haven't you got your own work to do?
Ms Miserable: Yes but....
rm -rf: Fuck off and do that then, the boss isn't here and neither is the troll and I'm not doing anything that I'm not required to do today.
Ms Miserable: So there's nothing I can do then?
rm -rf: Yes you can fuck off and do your own work that you've put on the too hard to do pile.
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Comments
She's At It Again.
Ms Miserable has been asked to do some work and is flapping because she is utterly shit.
We've been stuck on a second line support rota are supposed to support once every seven working days. Today is the turn of Ms Miserable.
Ms M: This job has come in what can you tell me about it?
I: Nothing? Have you rung the user to find out what the problem is?
Ms M: Yes but if I do that I won't know what I am talking about.
I: Can't you get what he is doing up on the screen?
Ms M: How do I do that?
I: With the software you have been trained to use.
Ms M: I don't know how to use it.
Trollwoman: Why don't you sit with Ms M and show her how to use it.
I: Because I'm busy, why don't you.
Trolllwoman: Oh no, I'm far too busy for that.
Ms M: If I ring the user will you speak to him.
I: Well I might as well ring him myself.
Ms M: Well I don't want dump this on you.
I: GRRRRR!!! That is exactly what you are doing.
Ms Miserable goes off for her usual three hour fag break.
Helldesk
Now I am stuck back on reporting again for a bit I am quite bored so am playing "good cop", "bad cop" with report requesters. The first person from a particular department I am really helpful and disgustingly ingratiating with and then when someone else from that department asks for something I am refusing to do it unless they provide with all sorts of things I am sure they either don't know or can't easily get. Hopefully this is fostering a climate of confusion and insecurity.
In between that I am having a on going argument with someone who asked for something 6 months ago. I got around to having a bit of look last week and asked for some more info and when I hadn't heard from him after 2 days I closed the call saying "User has not responded. Call is closed, closing call." Apparently he didn't like this because the next day he logged another call moaning that although I'd taken 6 months to respond him I'd only given him 2 days to respond to me. I responded to that call instantly, and when he didn't respond within 10 minutes closed that call too. Then I went for a cigarette break and when I came back the helpdesk said he had had the cheek to phone up moaning about that as well. I explained that I thought he wanted as long to reply to me as I had taken to reply to him so since I had replied to his call instantly and he hadn't responded instantly that was fair enough. Apparently that isn't what he wanted and he just wants his problem dealt with. So I told him he'd better log another call if he has something he wants me to do, he didn't want to do that so I asked the help desk to do it for him. Then I asked him again for the info I wanted and he didn't respond to that quickly enough either so I've closed that call this afternoon. I think this could get quite ridiculous.
Sounds
Sounds like you are being a bit of an officious nob there Joey. Sounds like the sort of thing the horrid troll woman does.
Yes
I am being as officious as possible. Some people deserve a good dose of officiousness every now and again.
Dog Training
You just need to be polite and insistent
Ms M: This job has come in what can you tell me about it?
I: It looks like a job
Ms M: If ring them I won't know what I am talking about.
I: Try saying as little as possible
Ms M: But I don't know what to do
I: I know what you should do
Ms M: What ?
Trollwoman: Why don't you sit with Ms M and show her how to do it
I: Shut up
Trolllwoman: OK
Ms M: If I ring the user will you speak to him.
I: No
Ms M: But I can't
I: So don't
Ms M: I have to do something
I: I think you should get on with it then
Ms M: Will you help me Richard, you're so handsome
I: Yes
Ms M: OK
I:
Ms M: Er ...
I:
Ms M: I thought you were going to help me ?
I: I am, trying not to distract you whilst you get on that phone
Flaw.
You wouldn't have been able to tell the horrid troll woman to shut up. She used to work in a Jobcentre and is therefore a bully and an idiot.
Idiot Users..Idiot Support.
I've just been passed a job about a user not being able to view a document in one of the systems we look after....
A brief outline of the emails that have passed between the user and our no-support desk.
User: Computer 1234 having a problem.
No-Support Desk: Can we have more info?
User: It doesn't work.
No-Support: Are you getting an error message?
User: Yes.
No-Support: What is the error message?
User: There is an error message.
Then the twats have passed it to me.
Hah hah !
It's universal
I keep getting bug reports that I am supposed to be able to act on and fix something which are just long rambling inconsequential stories about what someone once did, somewhere, to something.
E.g.
"I was looking at the screen and looked for a patient comm contact and I clicked on the broaden search button and some comm contacts were shown but when I un ticked the box another one was shown that was different to the first one. It didn't show any finished patients
BROADEN SEARCH should never show finished patients !!!!"
Huh ? What, I have no clue what you're on about and what you've written makes no sense.
What's really annoying is when this junk is just given straight to me by the test team who are supposed to at least try to identify the bug and explain what's not working. For that bug I just closed it and sent it to back them saying ...
"On the assumption that this is possibly related to the prescription management application ... This is working as designed but not necessarily as people may expect."
Shortly after I closed that, as expected, the tester demands an audience ...
"You've haven't done anything with this have you ? Why did you close it ?"
"Yes I have, I wrote a comment"
"But you didn't do anything to fix it ?"
"Read the comment"
< tester reads comment >
"It's a little ... vague ... isn't it ?"
"Vague ?"
"Yes, a bit vague, what do you mean it's working ?"
"Is there a bug ?"
"This is a bug"
"No, it's a story"
"It was reported to us"
"So you know what's happening then do you ?"
"I'll show you"
< tester clearly has no clue what they are doing but opens up prescription management app anyway and tries to use it >
"Look, it shows some comm contacts when I click on this"
"Yes"
"What do mean yes ?"
"What do you think I mean ! Isn't that what it's supposed to do ?"
"I don't know"
"It is"
"I'm not sure"
"What do you think should happen"
"I don't know"
"Is this what the person did to generate this bug report ?"
"I think so"
"With that hospital"
"I don't know"
"So this isn't what the person did to generate the bug"
"They could have done"
"That's what it's supposed to do"
"Are you sure ?"
"Yes"
"So there is no bug then is there"
"I don't know"
"Well when you do know you can re-open this bug and send it back to me can't you"
Pointless Paper Pushing.
We are creating a Intranet Application Directory which tells everyone what systems we have and what they do and what a user needs to do to get access to them
A sensible idea you might think until you realise that these systems are all fucking restricted and if you don't know what they are then you dont need to use them.
Some dickhead creating work for works sake instead of doing something worthwhile.
I hate doing pointless shit.
Fucking Twat.
She was at it again.
Les Miserables: Have you got some....
I: No I'm busy.
Les Miserables: Yeah but...
I: No I'm busy.
Les Miserables: ...but but...
I: No I'm busy.
FICKING FICK!
I gave the silly cow some piss easy work to do and she's fucked it up. Now I got to explain why some of the data has disappeared.
Sillyness
Today we discovered that the cause of a problem we've been telling our infrastructure team was being caused by their load balancers and causing us all untold misery and heartache was actually caused by their load balancer and that despite them claiming to have investigated it dozens of times over the last 6 months whenever we've moaned at them it was in fact not a single server but a clustered server and whilst one of the nodes was set up sensibly the other one was complete random nonsense and gobbledegook and that apparently they had never noticed this or known that it was clustered. Despite them having set it up in the first place.
Last week after a succession of infrastructure related disasters we thought we'd just quadruple check that our source control server was actually backed up like that had said it was on the dozens of times we had asked them whether it was previously. It turned out they didn't actually know where they had installed this server or which one it was or how to find it in our tiny server room. Luckily they had been wondering what the server with cables coming out of it that weren't plugged into anything were and began their search with that. Then they remembered that they had been intending to back it up but had got bored whilst actually plugging in the backup device and gone off to do something else. The mysterious wires were attached to the missing server the only remaining mystery is where the missing backup device they were supposed to plug into has gone.
Back Ups
Our "Systems" team decided it would be a good idea to back up our source control on the same server as it was stored on....
More sillyness
Having forced us to develop everything we've done on the basis that we had to use Kerberos authentication and absolutely not consider using anything else, which involved an awful lot of configuration of everything for everything that we've done the infrastructure team this afternoon realised that in the live environment they have just built, in which we will be installing our finished product this weekend, they have not set up kerberos correctly and don't know a) how it works, b) how it's supposed to work and c) why it doesn't work. There solution was "Well, I think we'll just turn it off then - your code would cope with that wouldn't it ?"
No ! No ! No ! Muppets !
Sounds entirely reasonable
For a change I can't fault that.
I have spent all day working whilst the rest of the dev team have spent all day giggling amongst themselves, looking at pictures on the interweb and chanting "Joe's broke it ! Joe Breaker ! Fix it Joe, Fix it". I almost became quite irritated.
Last week we discovered the reason why all the services which everything else rely on never work for more than 1 minute with more than 1.2 users trying use the application. The magic solution was to install the beta version of the crucial data layer which absolutely everything relies on, on his last day our most competent contractor was tasked with performing the upgrade which, proving how good a lot of contractors are, he did perfectly and conscientiously. Today I started to rebuild everything else to work with the new, non backwards compatible, data layer. But oh no ! What's this ? The beta version contains a massive error which stops everything we've done from working at all. Panic, for some reason the boss is under the impression that installing random beta versions the instant someone tells you to is a 100% guaranteed route to software stability and suggests I send threatening e-mails to the development company explaining how much panic and terror they have caused, without checking whether a later beta version exists in which this bug is fixed. Threatening e-mails are sent and, at great personal expenditure of precious energy, I devise a cunning workaround which will allow our code to function, sort of. The development company reply, "Yeah, we released a later version where we fixed that yesterday".
Tomorrow I expect we will jump right in and upgrade to this version only to discover it breaks something else. What fun, I can't wait.
Yesterday also saw the development manager, who no one has seen in person for months, publish his final plan to release. The big day will be on the Whitsun bank holiday. Bowing to pressure he has finally allowed for 2 weeks of testing on the live equipment but strangely this ends the day before it is all supposed to go live. I have pointed out that if you are so optimistic that the testing will be a complete success and we will need no time at all to fix anything which turns out to be disastrously broken there is really no point in bothering to do the testing at all. Apparently this point of view has been carefully weighed and considered and completely disregarded because on the other hand everything may all go perfectly and then we'd look silly delaying the launch of a pristine 100% perfect, shrink wrapped, application, which fundamentally relies on untested beta version data layers.
Work Related Stupidness
Talking of work related stupidness, I am still at work, I think it's time to fuck off.