In my experience with computers and various programs, the more you use the easier things get. At the very best, you learn shortcuts you can use to make things go faster and you learn how more advanced features can make things better. At the worst, you get used to it and you work around the problems to finish what needs to get done. Either way, things get easier.
It hasn't worked this way with the new program at work.
Yes, it's only been two and a half weeks, but even in two and a half weeks of using a program, the things you do most often should seem easier because you know the steps.
Nothing has gotten easier. For anyone.
There are not shortcuts. Only the long way.
All the documents in the clerk work queue are called "Document Other Pull" so we have to click to bring up the page where we scroll down so we can click on the name of the doc that opens a new window where we click to allow us to see non-secure items which allows the document to be displayed in a shit Java MSPaint-wanna-be program where the document is way to small to read and we can't just click to make it bigger even though the mouse looks like a magnifying glass because that only makes the image smaller so we have to adjust the percentage or click the plus symbol and then adjust by grabbing the scroll bar, which is way to sensitive and as long as you keep pushing up, it keeps creating more white space to move up in. Oh, and I forgot to mention the 10-30 seconds worth of waiting in between each page or window for the damn thing to load.
And that's all to just view (Yeah, I split a fucking infinitive. English can do it and we should do it. Fucking Normans and their fucking stupid fucking French and its fucking influence on the English language.) the thing to see what it is. After that we decide what we should do with it. Sometimes that mean closing the task (one click) but mostly it means sending it to someone else (like 10 clicks intermixed with typing and searching).
During the last two weeks: I have heard two of the secretaries sob over this. One told me that she's cried more than once. I watched a court reporter throw her mouse at her keyboard. Instances of cussing have increased several times among everyone, and some have stopped doing it under their breath. And one day I felt like grabbing a man, dragging him out of the office and throwing him over the balcony.
I haven't written or replied to any e-mails during these last two weeks and I think I only wrote one response to a blog post. Sure, I'm still reading, but anytime I think of a response, it's more sarcastic than usual or just plain mean. Seems that I've been doing a good job of keeping the meanness and sarcasticness out of the replies I write here, but if it creeps in, it's my fucking blog and I can call a person a shit eating baby fucker if I want to.
It's been real hard to think positive or even neutral.
And at the rate I'm being offered new jobs, I'll never be positive again.
5 comments:
How dare you diss the Normans!
Mostly I diss their, unfortunate, need to cram the beautifully curvey form of English into the strict square hole of their proto-French. Bastards.
And the way so much of it has stuck for the last THOUSAND years. Fuckers.
Bad day, eh?
I don't know how I missed this post. And as a descendant of those Norman bastards, I personally think French is more beautifully curvey than English. Of course English is still going the rules of 1000 year old French so... um.... y'all might be the problem.
Not being snarky, just an attempt at humour.
Breathe Ticknart, breathe.
Then go throw whoever had the idea for this software out of a window.
Bad month going on a lifetime. And I got the joke. Still...
I'm also a descendant of those Norman bastards, just don't speak French.
The way that I see the French language, with its institute and all, is that it's trying, and succeeding I must say, to hang on to all the rules that Latin had, but it also wants to, and did on some, force those rules on languages that didn't develop in the way. To me, English is like a large tree that absorbs, or should absorb, the good and interesting light and nutrients of other languages to grow and thrive. French is more like an amazing structure built on a solid foundation and new additions get built after careful consideration and planning so they can also be supported by that foundation. The Normans took their proto-French and made it chic, they were the royalty, after all, and the learned men who spoke French and English tried to force the French foundation under the tree of English to make English more acceptable to the Normans and, in the process, tried to prune off some of the most interesting things that English can, and should, do as a language.
There, I think I killed that metaphor.
As for the guy who started this software project, he's been recalled to the army (or Navy or whatever) and is in Germany by now. I wish he were here being tortured by this program, too.
"Well", she said, watching the metaphor die, "Perhaps we can go to Germany and hunt the bastard down".
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