Another Reason Why They Pay Me The Big Bucks

One of my clients insists on using a funky form for inputting estimates, the likes of which I have never encountered before.

Truth be told, back in October, I was sent to a seminar specifically to teach me how to process said form, but of course, I daydreamed throughout the entire thing, thinking about how excited I was to be a block away from the West Village Jacques Torres store, and man I was gonna go pick me up some truffles like there was no tomorrow, and Jesus when is this seminar gonna be over anyway?

As you can imagine, I didn’t learn much in the seminar.

Here we are, four months later, and I’m finally sitting down to type up some estimates for a project. How hard can this be?

I’ll tell you how hard. So hard that I spent ALL DAY yesterday (with an hour’s break to go to the rapist) fiddling around with the system, doing online tutorials. When I finally thought I’d figured it all out, the motherfucker would log off automatically, and I would lose everything. When I finally figured out how to save everything, there would be some weird category that I wouldn’t know the answer to, and I would have to wait 5 hours for someone to get back to me with the proper info to input.

Mind you, in order to have access to this system, you have to have someone in INDIA assign you a username and password. Which in and of itself, took two weeks.

The emails went a bit like this:

Me: I need to gain access to the ________ system. Please add me as a user.

India: (3 days later) You’ve been added to the system. Please stand by for the email with your password.

Me: I did not receive my password.

India: (3 days later) Did you get our email with your password yet? You should have received that.

Me: No. Please resend.

India: Did you?

Me: Motherfucking shitass whorebags no I did not get the fucking email with my fucking password yet, can you please connect me with a real person who can actually help me with this because it’s now been 2 fucking weeks and still no password, and I am basically sitting around with my thumb up my ass until I can gain access to your retarded system that makes sense to no one but YOU. You assholes!


Needless to say, that didn’t exactly get me my password.

Just a word of advice to anyone who is in the process of setting up a system that is supposed to “better” the workload or make things more “efficient”. It ain’t gonna happen. Just know that your employees are going to expend more energy trying to figure out the process. More energy going to the bathroom to scream and tear their hair out. More energy complaining about it. Believe me, I know. I’m on day 2 of inputting the same stupid estimate…something that should have taken half an hour.

I’m pretty sure that, had I paid attention at the stupid seminar…I’d still be in the same boat. So don’t get all high and mighty on my ass, dear readers. ;)