Where’s the peanut butter?!

at work i’ve been struggling with this frustrating situation for months. there’s this guy in my group, let’s call him Fred Jones. Fred’s does fine work, but the problem is that there is another Fred Jones in a totally different part of the company, let’s call that K-Bloc. Now someone who works in K-Bloc went into some accounting system and entered a record saying there is some pending money to process for “Fred Jones” but picked the Fred Jones on my team instead of the one in K-Bloc. This launches a long process where the system wants me (Fred Jones’ manager) to approve. This wouldn’t be incredibly bad but for two points. First, I’m not trained in the tracking system at all and can’t even find a way to decline the transaction. Second, the system, naturally, doesn’t give a shit about this. It has one job that it needs to accomplish and that is to crack the whip over all the worthless workers who never do what they’re told (clear the transaction). It doesn’t care about nuanced exception states like ‘needing help’ or ‘exposing a clear log to show people in my situation who created the entry so I can follow up.’ There is an email alias I can contact for help, but this is only marginally better than contacting bill collectrs.

the push for national identity cards has cooled (possibly as a consequence of solid reasoning against them by the ACLU), but what would this look like with a national ID card? Well it might seem a little better since it should be harder to pick the wrong Fred Jones in the first place. That’s a definite plus. And it might be easier to design systems without issues like this. But that’s where the positives that I can see end and where the overwhelming negatives start coming up.

In my situation this was with a foreign subsidiary. foreign countries and subsidiaries won’t immediately recognize a national identity that only applies to some other country, if they ever do. It took me forever to get my situation resolved, and in this case the consequences were benign. Imagine the integration of a billing billing screw up where it actually matters for your identity if you couldn’t get a situation like this resolved. If a bill were wrongly attributed to me and I couldn’t get the bill issuing entity to resolve the situation quickly and suffer damages because of this (maybe in the form of bad credit) could I sue K-Bloc for damages? Or think of the criminal opportunities if you could get an identity created that doesn’t really exist. Would it be easy to remove records from the system? What if, while cleaning up a fake identity, an engineer accidentally removed a real individual’s record?

Anyway, after just four short months and about ten email threads trying to find someone who understood the situation and could help, I finally got it resolved. I just wish I could get the hour or so of my life back that I spent trying to get this cleared up. One last observation: no wonder tracking all the money in a big organization is hard!

I wanted to get something for my team at work for the holidays and
finally got around to delivering the most recent publication from the
Donald, which will either cement me as the best or worst lead of their
careers. I’m referring, of course, to href="http://www.amazon.com/White-Apples-Taste-Stone-1946-2006/dp/061853721X/sr=8-1/qid=1169513193/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6496738-0847206?ie=UTF8&s=books">White
Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 by
current U.S. Poet Laureate href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Hall">Donald Hall.
“What,” you may ask, “does poetry have to do with test automation
systems?” and the answer is of course “Nothing,” which is exactly what
I’ve always thought the best gifts are, anyway. Unexpected, yet,
(hopefully) enjoyable. I’ll find out when manager feedback data comes
in…meanwhile, here’s a sample which is reprinted in the anthology:

NAMES OF HORSES

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, up hill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day, hanging wide from the hayrack.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the window sill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and laid the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground.old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.