Dancing to Dirges

Depressing and happy things Tim says, sometimes while drunk

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Personally, I'm the VP of snark. I have a system for it.

Due to various technical snafus (MICROSOFT!) I'm having to quite suddenly switch from my usual data environment to a different, less familiar environment. Considerably less familiar. And I'm having to make this transition more or less on the fly. Like, last week I could use my old program and today that program is completely nonfunctional, and there are jobs piling up that have to be done. Today.

So I went out back and told production that the current queue is going to take longer to resolve than is usual, and please bear that in mind when looking for jobs. Also, because we're having to use a new process (that I am making up as I go along) they should be extra diligent in their setups. This led to production going to my boss and asking if jobs will always take extra time and require extra diligence from here on out. That is, they asked if we were intentionally choosing to implement an inferior and more time consuming process.

What's hilarious about this all is that it's a good question, considering the company. It is entirely reasonable to expect elements in this company to sit down and say "Here, we have this fully functional, efficient, reliable system. What can we do to screw this up. Are there more steps we can implement? How about we hire a VP of this particular thing? Oh, I know, let's just have a couple dozen meetings on each stage." So, yes. Reasonable to wonder if we had intentionally traded a good system for a bad system. We have a history of that.

So when I say that I'm "happy" in my current job, I can honestly say that I'm a good deal happier than I was. But I also mean that sometimes I am endlessly amused, because that's the best defense against frustration.

Well. Back to the money-burning machines. We have some money we could be burning, and we're not, and there's going to be a meeting about it later.

2 Comments:

At 3:10 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Here, we have this fully functional, efficient, reliable system. What can we do to screw this up?"

Oh yes, this does happen. Been there.

--Trey

 
At 10:21 AM , Blogger Mike Alexander said...

This is why I try to encourage a company policy of "late adoption", and "if it ain't broke don't fix it" (in a small company it is actually possible to influence policy to some extent). I must say I'm glad we never upgraded to Vista!

 

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