Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

this isn't so much due to technology, but a poorly mapped out process that technology enabled. I just want you all to marvel at the bad design of this process.
-----------------------------------------

so at work, our customer care agents' tickets have to be escalated because if their headset doesn't work or they've lost access to a program, that inhibits their ability to take calls (or if they're in training, actually learn). So there has been a standing MS Teams chat where managers can post the ticket numbers so IT can escalate or give quick updates to them.

Every year, some of our teams go through Annual Enrollment and we hire seasonal representatives through partner sites. They decided, foolishly, to separate this into a separate MS Teams chat. so issues with permanent agents would go in one chat, issues with seasonal agents would go in the other. and of course you'd get a stern correction if you made a mistake.

This was the case for several months and everybody more or less fell in line. Inexplicably, a week or two ago, the IT team decided it only wanted one Escalation chat. They didn't explain this to anybody via mass communication like an email (or if they did, it didn't go to the full audience). One day, IT just stopped responding to the tickets in the original Escalation chat. People started to ask for updates without response, and my boss's boss had to escalate before IT finally looked at tickets that had sat for 5 days.

Then, he started posting the following message, over and over, once per morning, in the original chat: ""ALL!! All escalations during the AE period should be put in the AE War Chat Room until the end of the AE period". Instead of copying and pasting the tickets in the 'wrong' chat to the correct one and sending this message as a 'tsk tsk' for going forward, he just decided to ignore them all. Some people never see this message because people are still putting tons of new ticket numbers in the old (wrong) chat, which push his message off of the screen (and he didn't Pin the message at the top or anything).

Today, after about 40 tickets had gone unresponded to, one of the actual directors of Customer Care showed up and started asking IT why they were ignoring all of these tickets, and to tell her where they're supposed to put them, because a lot of people didn't have access to the War Room Chat. Why? Well, because the IT director set the invite up to where it couldn't be forwarded, so it was just sent to the list of managers whose names he had several months ago. Never mind several people got promoted to manager since then, or that many managers never got an invite to that chat because their teams do not house seasonal representatives. So they're being directed to a chat they don't even have access to.

I mean this sounds like dude just created a process that would fail intentionally.

he = the IT manager person who is He Who is in Charge of Chats

bitch about your stupid, annoying coworkers more like it amirite

but yeah, the whole channels thing in Teams or Slack can be a huge nightmare

Get a new job already, N, at this point it’s starting to look like masochism. It’s the best job market maybe ever; switch fields if you have to, just do it.

There are reasons atm why I need the stability of a job that I've been at 17 years that won't bat an eyelid when I have to disappear unexpectedly due to emergencies in the home and the devil I know is what I need until stuff simmers down.but after, certainly

maybe if you had a dedicated thread to bitch out your job and annoying co-workers, and the suckiness of your job didn't seem to end up on almost every semi-relevant thread ... not to be a dick, but ... the fact that your job suckiness does seem to end up everywhere makes sympathetic ilxors keep suggesting you get a new job.

i'm definitely not mad at people for making the suggestion and I realize it's kind of spilling into multiple threads so I'm gonna work on just like...keeping it on FB or something.

to be honest I'm more posting for "lol get a load of this fucking guy" reactions as opposed to being vein-popping angry but it doesn't always read.

lol I could go off about all kinds of inefficient processes at work involving Teams and Sharepoint and OneDrive and Outlook and an outdated file management system that's separate from all that and only accessible to me via remote server that I have to log in to a VPN before I can access (I've actually been avoiding starting on something this morning, I just realized, because it's so painful to go through all the steps I have to go through to get the files I need). I also just generally find the Microsoft suite baffling, for example there is so much overlap between teams and sharepoint and onedrive. Even right now I'm involved in a project that I can access through sharepoint but not teams for some reason, whereas other projects I can access through both. I guess this fits "backward steps" in the sense of creating all these tools that are supposed to make workflow easier but just actually complicate things because things are scattered between more places and there's a lot of overlap and redundancy.

Every time I need something from the file management system:
1) Log into vpn on computer
2) "Approve" vpn login on phone
3) Log in to remote serve on computer
4) wait 3-5 minute for it to load
5) log in to microsoft suite on remote system, so I can email myself stuff from the file management system
6) get verification code texted to my phone from microsoft
7) enter code
8) load slow-loading file management system
9) email myself file from slow-loading file management system

We are supposed to migrate away from this to a unified salesforce-based system sometime *soon*, like the transition is supposed to be in process.

that sounds excruciating

in 2010 or so we used citrix as a remote desktop, it was so janky

It is actually anxiety provoking, especially since if I get interrupted before I finish and forget about the task for a while, I could wind up getting booted off.

During mandatory work from home, especially in the early days, it would frequently fail to log me in at all or run extremely slowly. It was nightmarish.

I acrually miss citrix desktop. Users could at least wrap their heads around the idea of having a virtual desktop that wasn't the actual PC desktop on their machine. Now with o365/onedrive/sharepoint/teams, they have no idea where their files are and you can't "save as" to rename and put them where you want them. It's just default download or open in the cloud. And the only training they're getting is canned MS propaganda that says nothing of how it works differently in our environment with shared autologin workstations and the like. Local IT can't support it because they have very little control over it. One of its primary selling points is cutting IT costs (staff) through standardization, but it's really just leaving it up to users to figure out or screw up on their own.

i do not miss Citrix desktop at all. hate virtualization setups in general, they "save money" by giving shitty low memory allocation workstations that are also network-constrained

"Open in Desktop App" after which you are prompted to "Continue Here." Extremely fucking confusing even to me as a person who's generally pretty comfortable learning new platforms. And you have to be super cognizant of whether you are working on a cloud document or a desktop document, otherwise you lose stuff - it looks identical except for the autosave feature being on.

While we are at it, Word still has not done a stich to straighten out all of its insane auto-formatting problems, they only seem to get worse. As someone whose job is like 30-50% drafting things in word that require a lot of formatting, this is another nightmare. Random font and style changes in mid sentence, painstakingly setting up "Styles" that never actually hold or work, endless confusion about list levels and numbering continuation. And merely saving a doc to the cloud and opening it on another computer can entirely change formatting -- we had a filing nightmare once where at the last minute we were over a page limit because of this.

It used to feel like you could kind of get around this stuff by learning advanced stuff and becoming a power user, but now it just seems FUBAR.

As a sharepoint admin/developer i avoid this stuff by avoiding this stuff

Theyll catch me someday boys but pls god not today

Virtualized development environments were the best thing about one of my old jobs because you could clone your machine and run several different scenarios concurrently and you didn’t lose all of your work if your office machine died or waste days getting set back up after a mandatory technology refresh

I acrually miss citrix desktop. Users could at least wrap their heads around the idea of having a virtual desktop that wasn't the actual PC desktop on their machine.

these things still exist though -- Right Networks is the one I'm familiar with -- the janky thing was always moving things from virtual to actual, and the classic "how can I print?"

Honestly, one thing that keeps me sane is the ability to create shortcuts to folders that I think should be in certain directories or subdirectories, but the owner (generally, my co-worker) has put elsewhere, because his organizational schema is different than mine, partly due to working on different parts of projects than I do, and also because his brain is a mystery and he doesn't get enough sleep.

One thing I don't miss, ever, is the old versioning systems where you had to check files in and out -- I think there was one that had some kind of penguin emoticon or something? This was over 15 years ago and I only remember it being annoying

the word “repository” just came back to me in a nightmarish flashback

> some kind of penguin emoticon

was it a tortoise? (windows svn client)

I would argue the online restaurant menus are worse, because you actually need the menu to order food, so you're SOL if your phone doesn't support the technology, or your phone is dead, or you can't get reception, or (shock) you deliberately chose to leave the house without your phone attached to your body. see previous griping starting at this permalink. that was back in march! i think we're all ready to have paper menus back, please.

― I Am Fribbulus (Xax) (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, October 26, 2021 10:32 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

fuck a QR code in any situation

― adam, Tuesday, October 26, 2021 11:36 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

found my tribe

was it a tortoise? (windows svn client)

― koogs, Wednesday, October 27, 2021 11:23 AM (eleven hours ago)

it might have been a fish?

The "blurred background" or jokey beach / cityscape backgrounds in video calls are way more distracting than just showing your stupid fucking room.

If you don't know how to point your camera in a direction that doesn't show your sex toys or your ravaged liquor cabinet or your hanging laundry, I can't help you.

You could also do a cityscape with your dildos and pretend they're a piece of Stonehenge

mine shows my dj setup on a costco craft table behind me, with monitors on shoeboxes, and a mostly empty floor-to-ceiling shelf with a couple of random papers on it. i just ... don't fucking care.

some folks though... there's this one guy i see in committee meetings, it's like his ultra relief society mother or wife decorated his office or something. fucking martha stewart shit lmao. the guy is such an egotistical tool as well.

imho it's fine for y'all to not care! but everyone is different. i think it's really understandable to not want your private space to be public, for all kinds of reasons. even just for kind of psychological safety, needing home to be as distinct from work as possible, needing home to be a place that certain people are invited into. like, these spaces blurring together is a really enormous lifestyle change that we did not ask for. i also teach at a school with students from a huge range of socioeconomic backgrounds which can introduce several other challenging dimensions there.

and there's no other good place to put the computer desk in this room, believe me i've tried!

There is an exact right amount of caring. I do try to hide most of the dildos, bongs, empty Thunderbird bottles, and BDSM gear. Usually.

But you can go too far into curation and preciousness where you're just, like, "at what exact jaunty-yet-nonchalant angle should I place my expensive guitar in the hopes that someone will ask, 'oh, do you play the guitar?' and I can say 'yeah, I dabble a bit.'"

Either of those extremes though... in some moods I find them VASTLY preferable to that thing where there's a zone of blur-leading-to-sharpness around your head and behind you it's Cancun or whatever.

Some of those backgrounds make it look like you are in the middle of beaming up

And to Doc - if the blurring weren't so horrid I wouldn't mind blurring. Something about the way it fuzzes and sometimes it tracks badly and, just, gah. Especially when someone has a headset or has an unpredictable hairstyle and it ends up looking unreasonably choppy and sometimes just... GAH.

Hard gasface to the background judgers itt

Worse again for the use of dabble re guitar because now i rly feel judged goddamit

i don't mind blurring, it's the backgrounds that bother me. one coworker in particular likes to use really nerdy starship enterprise or ... harry potter??? ... backgrounds

Oh dear ok im somewhat onside with judging some backgrounds i guess

I am finding that approximately 73.2% of white suburban American middle-aged dads with white-collar knowledge-worker salaries have at least one guitar. And of those, 62.5% find a way to arrange their video-call workspace so that a guitar is visible.

I live in a small house with at least nine guitars. My "office" is also the music room (also the game room, also the storage room, also the exercise room, also the guest room, also the art room). I confess that sometimes guitars have leaked into the background of my video calls but I see some people who I suspect of arranging it so that they do.

(yes that is judgy, feel free to judge my judginess in a downward-spiraling cycle of judgementality)

Still I also don't love the effect of "blur my background" when it makes it look like you have several strips of scotch tape awkwardly arranged around your head. THAT judgment is not aimed at the people who want to enforce privacy or assert a work-life balance, but rather at how the software has failed to give us a less-harsh way of doing so.

my Slayer flag has appeared in a few trainings

not judging that one bit

my work mac isn't up to replacing my shitty flat with a video of the cgi backdrops from Max Headroom, but i think that'd be quite cool.

Yeah, I really don't like my professional contacts to access my home and it's difficult to find a right angle to have NOTHING but a white wall in the background... but the various other solutions (blurring, background pictures...) are not satisfying either.
I remember during a group meeting I noticed something strange with the cam of a guy in suit/tie at his desk with the logo of his company as a background. Then I found out he had put a picture of himself at his desk with the logo in the background AS A BACKGROUND and every now and then you could see him coming in and out of the picture of him.
I thought that was both ridiculous AND genius !

there's this bootlicker dude i work with who had a fucking momfluencer style letterboard for a while, with shit like "EMPOWERMENT" and "IT GETS BETTER" on it, every time i saw it i felt such profound secondhand embarrassment, absolute misery

yeppers

TS: LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE vs. LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE SLAYER

next week I'm going to bring my heavy metal actio nfigures into the training. i have a King Diamond, a Rob Halford, a goat from Venom, so many delightful choices.

when i turn on the web cam, I will duck behind the desk so it will appear that the action figure is talking. this is a stitch at the office, that's why they call me "Cutup Carl" even though my name isn't Carl and nobody thinks I'm actually funny

I blur. Otherwise I’d have to make my bed.

blurring would allow people to attend meetings from the can. afraid to point that out because then the company will mandate it

"bathroom breaks are no excuse for non-attendance! you have a mute and a blur button!"