Chaos Attraction

Shit For Brains

2021-05-26, 9:48 p.m.

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No Karaoke - 2021-05-31
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Cast list as of November 2019

Had to cancel entirely the Big Quarterly Project today and I can't resubmit it again until Tuesday. Why? Because I'm a goddamned idiot and did not notice that we gave them some random due date to change addresses of May 30. WHYYYYYYYY I AM SO FUCKING STUPID GOD I HATE ME TODAY. God, I suck. I don't remember who set that due date--mighta been my boss actually--but it's still on me for not thinking, "Gee, we might be done earlier than that" at any point in time. The due dates for this stuff are pretty arbitrary (and god knows nobody pays attention to them anyway), but once it involves International Clientele--which of course this does--everything goes disastrous somehow. And the stuff has been Piling On.

Oh yeah, and I got an extremely random email about how "so-and-so is going to send you his expedited paperwork tomorrow!" and I was all, "didn't I handle that one's business like AGES AGO?" (Please don't tell me he's come back.) Yeah, I totally did. Dudes mixed up which emergency international clientele they were dealing with this time and I was all "welp, I emailed the guy who's out today, guess I'm forwarding this to you too."

Also, work announced that everyone's going to be coming in and working at the front counter from now on come September because WE'RE A TEAM!!!!! And it's time that EVERYONE do customer service! EVERYONE!!!! Just like the good old days again, remember that, Jennifer?!

Also, Dawn asked if I could get vacation time to hang out with her and it looks like enough people have already booked vacation time off in June--and I have to cover for them being out for the next two weeks--that I cannot. Sigh. I did warn her it wasn't great.

Today rather sucked. We were doing the whole "bitching w(hine) mom" thing circa 3:30 and then Hope said that her wine delivery got canceled on her to boot. Then while looking for the wine emoji, I discovered "witness protection parrot" exists, and then looked at ALL of the emoji parrots. There are a lot of those things, as it turns out.

In other fun work news, I had to sit through the world's most ridiculous work seminar you ever saw. An organization whose name will be totally redacted from this decided to upgrade its website, and thus anyone forced to use their website for their Special Clientele has to watch this seminar on the New Upgraded System. LEMME TELL YOU HOW BAD IT IS.

(a) Apparently they limited the number of people who could get into the seminar, so only one of my coworkers actually managed to do it, and get in with sound on. My boss set up a Zoom so we could watch what she was watching. At least THAT worked, because nothing else apparently does. I noticed that a ton of people were literally getting kicked out of the chat and reloading over and over and over and over again. Go Microsoft Teams! You apparently work a treat! So glad most of Giant Org doesn't use you! (Everyone Zooms for a reason, Microsoft Teams.) They started telling people to log out and log back on and I was all "I dunno, you might not be able to..."

(b) The entire presentation starts out with, "We're not telling you how to use the new system, we're telling you all the problems with it." SERIOUSLY. They had a bunch of presenters, but one in particular (we'll call him Julio) seemed to be there just to tell us what's wrong with things and how to attempt to work around the broken stairs.

(c) Apparently this entire presentation was actually intended for clientele who have to get payments from this organization--they literally said nothing of any use to my group, who thankfully doesn't have to get money out of them for anything. We have to upload crap on demand for them, which they didn't really cover.

(d) I am not kidding when I say one of the first slides is "(redacted) will pay its bills!" Because apparently they haven't paid them since.... according to the chat, spring 2020 for some people. They had a slide up saying that they owe 400+ other orgs money since January, and that's what they ADMIT to in public.

(e) This organization uses a lot of acronyms with no explanation of what they are (Joe Biden would object to this). The chat audience clearly has no idea what any of them are referring to. Several requested some kind of list of acronyms, which did not happen.

(f) Julio literally said that the name of something "is misspelled in the templates, and needs to be misspelled for the time being." They claimed this would be fixed "pretty soon," which I did not believe at all whatsoever. My boss was all "Encouraging us to misspell!" and I was all "ENGLISH MAJOR CRIES" to this. (Also, this is especially ironic given the nature of our business.) Though I will note that one URL I have to use at work is also misspelled and I appear to be the only one who ever noticed, but god knows there's no point on reporting that to anyone.

(g) Julio: "Oh, I just realized that anyone calling in on your cell phones can't see my screen..." IT'S MAY 2021, YOU SHOULD BE AWARE THAT THAT HAPPENS BY NOW. They did have the slides online, at least (for your amusement, if not total edification).

(h) This is Julio himself, speaking on behalf of his audience: "Hey, Julio, I note that you have an Excel spreadsheet here, but we're not actually allowed to upload an Excel spreadsheet..." which lead into some extremely kr8tiv weird workaround, which I guess we are going to have to do uh, somehow. (This may have been the only time they said anything with regards to what we might have to do.) My boss was all "OH LORD" and we all said we had a headache now. Boss: "Who thought yes! This is brilliant, let's move it to production!" and "At least we test things before we do that." I was all, are we sure they did? Maybe this IS what we got after they tested it...

(i) They had another acronym that nobody understood for their tech support page. Also, for an organization that uses a lot of acronyms, they repeatedly told us all to SPELL OUT EVERYTHING IN FULL TO US EVERY TIME.

Also, the help tickets don't work right now and if you need any help, it could be 10 days. Hope was shocked enough at this, but let me quote from the chat about their tech support page: "I have submitted several Help Desk questions dated one month ago and have never received a response." "4 times on the phone they have confirmed that they have my email but I never receive any emails."

Someone else did address this by saying that "sometimes we don't know you have a ticket out there, they don't get routed to us" and said to REALLY SPELL OUT AND BE VERY SPECIFIC ABOUT EVERYTHING. Oh, for godsake, even my organization can figure out where to route the tech support stuff.

(j) Out of 23 organizations that have so far tried to use their website, 15 of them managed to upload something At All and 12 of them actually managed to do it correctly. My boss: "15 across the nation or the entire state of Hawaii?"

(k) Direct quotes from the presentation: "A comma in the wrong place can disrupt everything." "I know we used the word patience, and frustration, and that's all in there." They claimed they'd have the technical presenter make a bunch of videos to assist us. "The first video will be HOW TO DO THIS. And the second one will be how to do this. And the third one will be how to do this." They did not specify "this." "Julio is not for hire. We're not going to let you steal him. He's staying with us. His video was very dynamic. Julio will be the rock star."

(l) Direct quotes from the chat: "Thank you, Julio, that was very informative. I hope I remember it." "Thank you, Julio! Great info, but my brain just exploded. LOL." "Can we go back to the old system?"

(m) Direct quotes from my coworkers: "Soooooo...who's happy they got to spend 1.5 hours on this webinar with me?" "Hope you aren't quizzing us after this." "No way could I have replicated this and articulated the takeaways for you" (rofl emoji) "I am so grateful for Slack chat at times like this" (me)

(n) Oh, and the absolute BEST part? I don't know what happened--I was just watching via Zoom but I presumed that whoever was putting on the webinar had most likely shut off viewer mikes. Maybe they did and this was one of the actual other PEOPLE putting on the show, I don't know, but SOMEONE straight up said aloud "shit for brains" and everyone heard it. "I did hear that, thank you," Julio said, and continued. "Someone turn your mic off, that was inappropriate," another person sniped. AND THEY WERE RECORDING THIS TO PUT ONLINE LATER. We presume that somehow this one will not make it online. They are putting this seminar on about three times and my boss was all, they probably won't put this one up unless the other two are worse. I can't imagine.

I'm presuming the "shit for brains" may have been intended for whoever programmed this POS, maybe not so much the presenter, though. People were raving about the presenter, and to be fair, he did seem to be trying to be all "here is all the problematic stuff and here's some workarounds" about it.

But seriously, this sounds like an unusable POS and they make all of Giant Org's terrible tech look good by comparison.

After work, I drank again.


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