So if you are a regular reader, you know all about the TPS report I produce for my new company. The last time I mentioned it I said how widely it was being used by the upper end of the totem pole. As more and more people were added to the distribution list, one guy started to irk me. Let me rephrase - one guy who is used to getting his own way started to irk me. You see, he's on the business side of my company. IS works for him. He was a Johnny Come Lately to the report - yet he wanted changes made to it. I don't normally sit at me desk as I prefer a test lab close to my area. Dude called me three times in one day and I didn't get any of his messages. It was hilarious to hear the playbacks as it sounded like Lumbergh calling Peter at home when he was supposed to work on a Saturday. I didn't even call the guy back the next morning when I got the calls. He wanted another column added to the report and I guess I was supposed to either be impressed or intimidated that he was "looking" for me. I was neither. When he finally got through to me in the lab, he didn't so much ask as he told me to please add the column. I told him I couldn't that I was told by my boss who was out for a few days to not make any changes as multiple people were using it and changes would have implications. Also, a simple column addition was a big deal at this point because the report is created by cutting & pasting native results from one piece of software into Excel and then about 12 macros are run on the data. One column screws up everything at this point. Keep in mind while all of this is going on our software is going live within a month and there are hundreds (yes hundreds) of outstanding defects that everyone should be focused on. This guy calls my boss's boss to try to get the column added! Hilarity ensues. There is a meeting of giant egos and it's rumored my boss's boss walked out of the meeting in a huff after neither would budge. Yes, my report is so important that everyone wants to customize it.....which I already did. Every column on every tab is auto-filtered. This leads to more fun. Ego #1 got his panties in such a bunch that who knows what strings were pulled but suddenly it became a top priority of mine to get him his column....because if you don't play by my rules, I'll take my ball and go home. I added the column. Next, grumpy pants decides he needs the TPS report by 7:30 AM every morning. I already work 7-4 but told my uppers that I wasn't comfortable with promising this report by 7:30 AM every day as part of the beauty of working 7-4 is that you can't be late. Rumor has it my name came up in an email along with the words "not being flexible". Now if I respected any of these people - that might have hurt my feelings. However, I'm pretty damn confident that if you put the other interested parties in one room and me in another and summed all IQs much like a column in a spreadsheet - I would still come out on top. My boss (not to be confused with my boss's boss) told me not to worry about it and just do it as soon as I get in every day. The more I think about the request the more I let it bother me. The ying to my yang, the beautiful Mrs. Fan, tells me to put a read receipt on the email every morning with the report. Genius. I will see if Mr. Pompous Pants in fact does read the report the second he gets in every day. I don't want to bore you with the two weeks that I tracked, but it suffices to say that it was read before 8:00 AM exactly twice in that period and on some days the email was deleted without even being opened. Alas, I was checkmated though as a mysterious request came in from up above to drop the report in a network folder every day so I didn't have to email it out to the distribution list any longer. This made me smile as I was at minimum inside his head a little bit. In another meeting, I was asked to filter one tab of the report 4 different ways, then cut and paste those results into another spreadsheet and email them to such and such who needed those numbers. If you know me, I'm not very good at hiding my "Why the f*ck would I do that?" face which I'm sure washed across my face as a micro-expression before I calmly explained that EVERY COLUMN IS AUTOFILTERED and whomever gets the report can FILTER ANY COLUMN they want to see those results themselves with no extra work on anyone's part. The person making the request thought for a second and told me that they understood but needed to hold this person's hand with things. Then it hit me....the person making the "WTF" request gets the report every day but they themselves didn't know how to garner the information requested by using the filtered tabs. So, now I find myself slicing and dicing the report I created (in such a manner so that stuff like this didn't have to be done) to be customizable. Sigh. Heavy Sigh. On a final note (until next week) regarding the TPS report - my team was asked for something by Saturday morning (today) which we were trying to finish up yesterday. I am not making this up. I swear. At around 2 PM the application went kablooey in the region we were doing our task. My associate sent out an urgent email to our boss and our boss's boss and some other people who may be able to quickly get the problem resolved. We waited an hour with no response. I replied to all on the email that we needed this resolved so we could finish the task at hand. Ah, an email from one of the big guys....surely the problem is resolved so we can get working again on verifying the very buggy software before release. Nope. One row of the TPS report (out of over 2,000) looks like it's shifted one column to the right. Can I please get this resolved before I leave? No kidding. In the grand scheme of things, one line of the TPS report should matter about .000001% to the entire company right now....unless you're in upper management I guess. I've been in IT/IS for 17 years now in all capacities. I have never seen anything like this. Serenity Now!
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Go Ahead And.......
So if you are a regular reader, you know all about the TPS report I produce for my new company. The last time I mentioned it I said how widely it was being used by the upper end of the totem pole. As more and more people were added to the distribution list, one guy started to irk me. Let me rephrase - one guy who is used to getting his own way started to irk me. You see, he's on the business side of my company. IS works for him. He was a Johnny Come Lately to the report - yet he wanted changes made to it. I don't normally sit at me desk as I prefer a test lab close to my area. Dude called me three times in one day and I didn't get any of his messages. It was hilarious to hear the playbacks as it sounded like Lumbergh calling Peter at home when he was supposed to work on a Saturday. I didn't even call the guy back the next morning when I got the calls. He wanted another column added to the report and I guess I was supposed to either be impressed or intimidated that he was "looking" for me. I was neither. When he finally got through to me in the lab, he didn't so much ask as he told me to please add the column. I told him I couldn't that I was told by my boss who was out for a few days to not make any changes as multiple people were using it and changes would have implications. Also, a simple column addition was a big deal at this point because the report is created by cutting & pasting native results from one piece of software into Excel and then about 12 macros are run on the data. One column screws up everything at this point. Keep in mind while all of this is going on our software is going live within a month and there are hundreds (yes hundreds) of outstanding defects that everyone should be focused on. This guy calls my boss's boss to try to get the column added! Hilarity ensues. There is a meeting of giant egos and it's rumored my boss's boss walked out of the meeting in a huff after neither would budge. Yes, my report is so important that everyone wants to customize it.....which I already did. Every column on every tab is auto-filtered. This leads to more fun. Ego #1 got his panties in such a bunch that who knows what strings were pulled but suddenly it became a top priority of mine to get him his column....because if you don't play by my rules, I'll take my ball and go home. I added the column. Next, grumpy pants decides he needs the TPS report by 7:30 AM every morning. I already work 7-4 but told my uppers that I wasn't comfortable with promising this report by 7:30 AM every day as part of the beauty of working 7-4 is that you can't be late. Rumor has it my name came up in an email along with the words "not being flexible". Now if I respected any of these people - that might have hurt my feelings. However, I'm pretty damn confident that if you put the other interested parties in one room and me in another and summed all IQs much like a column in a spreadsheet - I would still come out on top. My boss (not to be confused with my boss's boss) told me not to worry about it and just do it as soon as I get in every day. The more I think about the request the more I let it bother me. The ying to my yang, the beautiful Mrs. Fan, tells me to put a read receipt on the email every morning with the report. Genius. I will see if Mr. Pompous Pants in fact does read the report the second he gets in every day. I don't want to bore you with the two weeks that I tracked, but it suffices to say that it was read before 8:00 AM exactly twice in that period and on some days the email was deleted without even being opened. Alas, I was checkmated though as a mysterious request came in from up above to drop the report in a network folder every day so I didn't have to email it out to the distribution list any longer. This made me smile as I was at minimum inside his head a little bit. In another meeting, I was asked to filter one tab of the report 4 different ways, then cut and paste those results into another spreadsheet and email them to such and such who needed those numbers. If you know me, I'm not very good at hiding my "Why the f*ck would I do that?" face which I'm sure washed across my face as a micro-expression before I calmly explained that EVERY COLUMN IS AUTOFILTERED and whomever gets the report can FILTER ANY COLUMN they want to see those results themselves with no extra work on anyone's part. The person making the request thought for a second and told me that they understood but needed to hold this person's hand with things. Then it hit me....the person making the "WTF" request gets the report every day but they themselves didn't know how to garner the information requested by using the filtered tabs. So, now I find myself slicing and dicing the report I created (in such a manner so that stuff like this didn't have to be done) to be customizable. Sigh. Heavy Sigh. On a final note (until next week) regarding the TPS report - my team was asked for something by Saturday morning (today) which we were trying to finish up yesterday. I am not making this up. I swear. At around 2 PM the application went kablooey in the region we were doing our task. My associate sent out an urgent email to our boss and our boss's boss and some other people who may be able to quickly get the problem resolved. We waited an hour with no response. I replied to all on the email that we needed this resolved so we could finish the task at hand. Ah, an email from one of the big guys....surely the problem is resolved so we can get working again on verifying the very buggy software before release. Nope. One row of the TPS report (out of over 2,000) looks like it's shifted one column to the right. Can I please get this resolved before I leave? No kidding. In the grand scheme of things, one line of the TPS report should matter about .000001% to the entire company right now....unless you're in upper management I guess. I've been in IT/IS for 17 years now in all capacities. I have never seen anything like this. Serenity Now!
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2 comments:
I'm a couple years behind you on IT experience, but I pretty much keep seeing the same idiots and the same bad practices like that everywhere. Everything is rushed to be delivered. Mistakes are left with the intent to fix later (which never happens).
Mrs. Fan is absolutely right and appears to have a tempered and experienced grasp of the sitchy-a-shun.
That kind of shit happens ALL the time. It really ain't no BFD. Just let the egos duke it out and laugh at the time and money they waste. Meanwhile, you are collecting your money on the road to retirement where you won't have to deal with the corporate idiots any more.
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