I wish the in-mates WERE running the asylum

glennji | Jul 11, 2007 min read

Boy do I ever not want to go to work today.

I’ve been up for a while — around 6:30 — and it’s now after 9am, so it’s not like I couldn’t get in early and catch up on some of the always-present, always-urgent, never-scheduled, always-stupid tasks that seem to get punted down upon us (from manager to manager all the way down to the lowly “plebs”, the betas, the only ones who actually seem to do anything — us, in other words). Take yesterday, for example: as well as the what-the? comment from my manager, I spent the good part of the afternoon needlessly pasting names and details of all our user accounts into a spreadsheet … even though the names all exist in a shiny little “single-sign on” database application. Oh, and the fact that we’ve got well over 70,000 users — more than will fit in a single Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It’s stupid whichever way you cut it. And that’s before even considering the security implications of having a list of user details on a network share somewhere.

Today I have to write my “Personal Development Plan”, despite the fact that it seems that our department has been set up as a kind of fly-trap — once you’re in, you’re not going anywhere. So, hmm, this year I want to develop my sitting-around-waiting-for-stuff-to-break skills, along with my answering-stupid-questions-from-stupid-people abilities. Yay team!