jeremyp
Philosopher
Did you at least look into the file to make sure that you put the September data in it and not the August data?
Cont: Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 11
- Thread starter catsmate
- Start date
Did you at least look into the file to make sure that you put the September data in it and not the August data?
For once I have a little bit of sympathy for the questioner, I've worked with many a company that would label something September 2023 Data when it contained the data from August because the report comes out in September.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Every row of that spreadsheet has as its first column the date that data is for. It literally says it's September data 245,000+ times.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
I don't make that kind of mistake: I delete old data before running new data, and I leave variables in stored queries commented out when I save them so I have to replace them before running it again. I am a very lazy monkey so I have long since minimized the amount of mental power I have to devote to routine tasks. I've made it so doing things wrong requires more effort than doing them correctly.
Ah so someone hadn't even bothered to open it before asking.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Even worse: I think they did, but didn't pay attention to anything inside it.
At a prior job I would on rare occasions, when I suspected people weren't using the files I sent them, "accidentally" send out blank files and see if anybody noticed. If they didn't respond "hey, this is empty" I knew it wasn't being used and I could stop. I don't do that at this job, it's much less of a Mickey Mouse operation generally so I feel I ought to do my best even if it's wasted sometimes.
But I still complain, hence my posts in this thread.
So Teams has suddenly decide it's my secretary and is automatically generated a task in my calendar anytime anyone asks me a question and I don't like this at all.
So if one of my coworkers just casually asks me if I've ever encounter this or that problem, suddenly I have a task "Have you ever encountered this problem?" that I have to mark complete.
So if one of my coworkers just casually asks me if I've ever encounter this or that problem, suddenly I have a task "Have you ever encountered this problem?" that I have to mark complete.
Wudang
BOFH
I remain against the death penalty in principle but occasionally principle has to bend to necessity.
ZirconBlue
Sole Survivor of L-Town
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
I've never seen this behaviour in Teams.
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
Apparently there are multiple ways to generate Teams tasks automatically. It's like Clippy on steroids.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
I know there are, I'm just saying that I haven't seen it create Outlook tasks based on conversations alone.
Find out who turned this feature on, and ask their manager lots of questions.
jeremyp
Philosopher
And you checked for a few lines that the dates were correct?
I’ve been in the computer industry for a long time and I’ve seen worse foul ups than this would require.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
What is this, the contrarian thread? This wasn't a mistake that occurred that I missed spotting, this was a thing that was absolutely correct and an idiot didn't realize it. Yes, I check my results, and in this case it wasn't even dates: it was a date stamp reading "202309" to indicate the data was for that month. I literally inserted that value as part of the select statement. It was not possible for any row to lack it, it was not possible for any row to have any other value present.
I commend the ability of posters here to immediately doubt and contradict everything ever said by anybody but sheesh, save that **** for the Politics forum. This is a venting thread, not an "Aha! I think I can catch you out in a mistake!" thread. Particularly since it's just an anecdote for which nobody will ever hear any other side to the story, or see any evidence for anything. Christ!
And I have to say I'm a bit offended that the kneejerk reaction seems to be "TragicMonkey must be bad at his job".
malbui
Beauf
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2004
- Messages
- 4,670
I don’t think anything is aimed at you, Monkey. I think this is just weary grey-haired people reporting from the front. Personally I’m cynical and battle-scarred enough that I spend five minutes before every finance meeting manually adding up key columns and checking the comparatives against previous reports.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
Oh believe me, I hear that a lot.
Uh, not about you. About my colleagues. And it's not because my colleagues are bad at their jobs, it's because the customers assume that their jobs are different from what they actually are.
We're customer service, not technicians. Callers shouldn't expect us to be technicians, because they are inevitably disappointed.
jeremyp
Philosopher
Well that's fine but as you originally reported it, it looked like you were ripping into a coworker for not trusting the name of the file.
Well, if you didn't check the file, you would have been bad at your job. In fact, you do come across as being a bit arrogant. Somebody asked you a question and you decided you couldn't be bothered to answer them. That's quite poor.
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
Well we are customer service technicians and some of my coworkers inevitably disappoint, which does make them a bit bad at their jobs. Not every day can be your first day, week or year. At some point you've got to start catching on figuring things out for yourself and not needing your hand held. Sure you'll make mistakes but just learn from them is all we ask. Yet even that seems too much for some.