The Quarter Just Gone

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Well.

Last quarter just gone (Happy new year to y’all). To give you some sort of insight into how it went, I shall use the following play which I have a feeling will struggle to make any sense whatsoever.

The part of Señor Woody shall be played by Gatesy from Tripod, being played today by me. The part of Mr. IMO2 shall be played by Noiseworks Jon Stevens, being played today by me. All incidental characters are being played by Wayne Brady, of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” fame, being played today by me. Anyway…

Begin

Scene 1

Señor Woody is rather stressed out, he has been working solidly for two weeks to ensure that the evil government get the right numbers to give the money to continue our services. Mr. IMO2 has spent the last two reading the news and generally not doing any work.

Today is the day that the reports are due to come in. Señor Woody has only had 2 hours sleep the night before due to a burgeoning malaise We join our players at the beginning of the day…

Mr. IMO2: mumble mumble…mumble…fuel database…mumble…are the reports…mumble…ready to be run? mumble

Señor Woody: Um, no. There is still some stats to come in.

Señor Woody (to himself): Which you would know if you actually did work.

Mr. IMO2: mumble…mumble…would you like me to run them? mumble

Señor Woody: Nah, it should be right. I’ll wait till they are all ready then run them and send them off.

Mr. IMO2: mumble…ok…mumble…I will run them next quarter…mumble

End Scene

Scene 2

Two hours after the first scene, Señor Woody’s health has taken a turn for the worse. It appears as though he will have to go home. Our hero goes to the overlord of IT, Mr. Hawk, to discuss the situation.

Señor Woody: Hey buddy, I’m feeling pretty shocking, so I’m going to go home and try and get better.

Mr. Hawk: Thats ok. Do you think Mr. IMO2 will be able to cope?

Señor Woody: Seriously, a trained monkey could do what I have left.

Mr. Hawk: Ok then, you get better then.

End Scene

Scene 3

Our hero, Señor Woody, has returned to work after 2 days off sick, still half out of it, but knowing that he needs to be there to make sure it has all gone correctly. Mr. IMO2 has gone to Melbourne for a meeting. The phone rings…

Señor Woody: Hello, this is Señor Woody.

Phone Caller: Hi, I got Mr. IMO2 to fix something up for me yesterday, and now my appointments have disappeared.

Señor Woody: …O_o. Fuck. I’ll fix that up for you…

30 minutes later in Mr. Hawk’s office.

Señor Woody: Hey boss. Mr. IMO2 fucked up.

Mr. Hawk: I was afraid that was going to happen. Can you fix it?

Señor Woody: I have fixed it, but this is ridiculous.

Mr. Hawk: OK, how about you write an email that you want me to send him, and I will copy and paste it and send the email from me.

Señor Woody: Lazy bastard.

Fin

So anyways, the upshot is, my boss is too lazy/scared to yell at him, so I get to continue to fix up his fuck ups, and stress out and cause myself yet more illness. And a note for you all, Gastro is not fun at all. 2 nights of no sleep and no food for 2 days really fucks you up.

So keep on keeping on people. And if those Indians win I’m going to go through monkeys at their team hotel for a few hours.

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The Sky Is Falling!

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Just messing with you, its not really falling. But the roof sure sounds like its going to give it a red hot go.

So, time to recap the events of the weekend, in Hi-Def for those of you using a good internet browser (and if anyone mentions IE, they will get slapped upside the head by the blog), so read on…

Well  Friday night was upgrade night. 12 hour days are just the uncoolness. The freaking cleaners finished before I did that day. So once I finished I pretty much just went home and died, nothing better to do really.

Saturday night was Kassie’s 21st party. Started on the Grand Ridge, ended up on the Green Cans of Death, which ruined my Sunday I can tell you. But Kassie had a good night so thats all that really matters.

Sunday was supposed to be clean up day in preparation for the inspection that we were due for on Monday. But Steph worked all day, and I was professionally hungover. So not much got done, but hey, fuck them. It should not take nearly 5 weeks to get a plumber to come look at a fucking oven. And they followed it up by having the balls to send us a letter stating that we were getting a black mark on our reputation for not paying rent. How is that fair? They screw us for over a month, they get away with it. We don’t pay rent for 9 days (and it is only 9 days) and we are suddenly the spawn of some lesser demon.

So yeah, some anger in there. But we did our part, until they stopped doing their part. They were warned.

Monday. Just another manic-with-a-shotgun-full-of-super-addictive-crack Monday. All the quarterly reports were due. They all went in. But yet again IMO2 kept up his great work. Kept bugging me to run reports that weren’t ready because I was still to busy fixing them up due to HIS incompetence. But when I finally let him get to running them (who knows why he wants to run them, maybe because its the easiest part and he can actually do it….sometimes) he just runs and sends. No checking of what was just sent. Which puts a bit of stress on me hoping that the bastards are right. ANd when one came back with errors, like it does every time, he did… yes my gallant readers, you are correct. He did FUCK ALL. If I hadn’t been on the return email list it would have gone past unnoticed. So I got to fix that up as well, on top of running an upgrade on a copy of other data so that it could be sent off right! It was a pretty busy Monday, I can tell you.

And for the cherry on top, he then has the balls to take all the glory (for want of a better word) about running and sending the reports. My ass. They would have been done faster, better and stronger if he had done what was asked of him when I asked him.

Oh well, I’ll move on… Till next quarter. Or maybe next week by the looks of things.

Netball. We went so close…in a figurative manner. This is Monday night netball, as opposed to Thursday night which is still on. So anyway, we finished 4th of 16, so thats pretty good. We got the double chance, handy. We played the first game, against the number 1 team.

We. Got. Flogged.

The ball just didn’t drop, so it was all over.

But thats cool, second chance, we can beat the next team we play, we already have this season.

Nope. Lost by 1. So we got bundled out in straight sets. And it was looking like we had the team to make it. Just the same mistakes kept happening again and again and again. Passes not thought through, too much haste. Pretty much every time we had a chance to make a break, or bring it back, certain individuals would rush it, or decide that they were a better player then they are, and before we knew it the ball was down the other end of the court and we were down more. But thats whats good about Thursday nights. Most of the problem players aren’t there…Except for Problem Number 1. The amount of tight games we have lost due to him, and only him, is ridiculous. Passes that fly over everyones heads, passes that no one is ready for. Stupid “I’m tough” bullshit that ends him out of play. Cracking at the umpire when he is clearly in the wrong. But hey, I just don’t like the guy at the moment. He just won’t get certain things into his head about certain issues, but thats what you get. Cock bag.

Anyways, boss is behind me, better get back to work. Or go to lunch. One or the other.

Oh yeah, new band I’m getting into, Emigrate. Richard from Rammsteins new band. It’s in English, and you can hear that he is the lead guitarist for Rammstein, but it is also very different. But I’m enjoying it so thats all the fucking matters.

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Of Upgrades & Injuries

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Well, its all going downhill now. Quarterly reporting due Monday. Total error reports sent out = zero. Total problems = fucking too many! IMO2, who was supposed to run all of the reports while I was off learning SharePoint, not only failed to complete them that week, but has spent the last two weeks failing to complete them, and has now taken the day off leaving me with 25-30k records to go through and make sure are correct.

I’m going to miss most of my Friday night fixing all that up, since there just isn’t the time to get the staff to do it, plus I have to install a patch on one of the programs to fix up yet more errors. So excitement. At least I will be able to blast the tunes out to keep me somewhat occupied.

But hey, I can deal because I know what this weekend holds for me. Fun Plus!™

Heller managed to do himself an injury Thursday, and it wasn’t doing a stupid stunt like we all expected. He was…running. How weak is that? Done the ligaments, so he gets to hobble around for a few days.

On other matters we played mixed netball last night, and kept up our undefeated status in the competition with a big win against some midgets. Should just about settle us into top spot. And we did it down a played the whole game. Only down point was when I managed to roll my ankle halfway through the last quarter. That sucked.

Oh well, report now finished, time to get to work. You will no doubt catch me in a toilet near you somewhere Sunday morning after my plans for Saturday night.

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You can copy text?

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Well it’s official, there sure should be some sort of competency test before people get employed at my work.

Background:We have started with a new plan for all consumers who call up to go through a central line, and then they would be referred on to the correct service provider.

Now the part where this all starts to fall apart is that the people who answer the calls have to register the clients into at least 1, and at times 3 or 4, different consumer databases. No biggy I thought. Well it is. When I attended the first training sessions for these people, I was amazed that some of them could dress themselves. A simple instruction, such as “Tick this box to register client A for service Z”, complete with a picture of where it was, projected onto a wall, required people to be stepped through it. How freaking hard is it? Look for box. Click box.

Once we finally finished all of the training sessions, thats when the real fun started.  These people were released into the wild…

Within the first week of this project going live, I was ass deep in incorrectly registered clients, was fielding an average of one call every 15 minutes about something not working (and by not working they meant they didn’t know what they were doing), and generally not being able to do my job because they couldn’t grasp the basic functions of the keyboard.

I have almost gone up to some of the worst perpetrators of sheer ignorance/laziness and slapped them upside the head. Why should I spend an hour trawling through 400k rows of a table to fix up the one you fucked up, sheerly because you couldn’t be bothered paying attention when I told you what to do, two weeks prior? Remember when I said “Now, make sure to search for a client before adding them in, as they may already be registered, and we don’t want duplicates”? Well, that wasn’t a fucking joke, that was fucking serious. It’s not a cakewalk to remove a duplicate, because, as mandated by “The Man”, we can’t delete shit out of any of the databases, because of the legal issues/ramifications.

Ok, rant done….for now….

Quarterly reporting continues. For once I’m not doing the whole fucking thing myself, as has been the case for the last year. The boss saved me from the repetition of running reports for a week, then ctrl+c alt+tab ctrl+v for an afternoon by letting me go off to Melbourne for a week. So I just get to supervise, and do the high level stuff, while the grunt work gets done by IMO2.

Well I shall leave you with a thought: If you are the only one on the map, and you lava jump, are you still a llama?

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