Last Friday was stock take day at work. We do a stock take every three months (which isn’t so bad, it used to be every two months). The company I work for is in the business of manufacturing pairs of glasses, so there are three basic types of stock item – frames, lenses, and accessories (cleaning cloths and cords etc).
Four or five years ago we used to have one big computer system that handled everything, order entry, manufacturing, stock, the lot. Then we decided to split out all the separate functions and use systems from different companies which specialised in those particular areas. As a result we now have three separate stock take procedures for the three different types of stock. It’s all a bit of a mess and I was much more confident handling the stock take procedure when it was all part of one big system that I understood. Now I have to print out a set of instructions every time, follow them like a monkey, and if it goes wrong I haven’t really got a clue where to look.
The lens stock take went wrong on Friday. For some unknown reason the previous stock figures were not cleared down properly, so after three people had spent all afternoon entering the new figures, we looked at the totals and saw that they were all over the place. No-one was in the mood to look at it at ten to five on a Friday afternoon, and we didn’t really know what to do to fix it anyway, so we did the lens stock take all over again this morning.
However we were able to get all hands on deck (well, nine pairs of hands) so it only took an hour to re-enter all the data. Why it went wrong on Friday I’ll never know. What I do know is that this isn’t the first time this has happened, and I’m dreading the next stock take, which will be on the first day back at work after the Christmas break. Oh joy.
At least I’m not the guy in the firing line any more!

Back in the days when I had a girlfriend/wife/partner, I used to get home from work and she used to ask me how my day was. After a few weeks of pretending to be interested, she stopped asking. This is why:
This morning I received from the courier a PC from one of our branches. They phoned me last Friday to tell me it wasn’t switching on when they pressed the power button. I asked them to send me the PC, but they said they didn’t have a box to send it in. So we had to send them an empty box on Friday. They don’t have a pick-up on Saturday, only a delivery, so they sent me the PC last night. I got it out of the box, plugged it in, pressed the power button and…. nothing. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to repair a broken power switch on a PC, but they are a bugger to get to. It’s not like putting in some more memory or a bigger hard drive. You can get to the innards of the PC very easily – what you can’t get to is the back of the front panel.
Some PC’s also dismantle easier than others. With some, you can see exactly how they’ve been put together, which screw undoes what, and you can get the job done quickly. Not with this one. After half an hour trying to work out the best way to get the front panel off without breaking all the little tabs, I realise that the top bit (where the power button is) is a separate section of panel. All I had to do was remove the cd-rom drive and I could lever this panel off. Easy when you know how.
So then I could see the problem. The switch is held in place by a little plastic clip which had broken off. The broken bit was still inside the PC. When you pressed the switch, it moved the whole mecahnism instead of activating the circuit. No problem, I thought, I’ll stick it back with a dab of glue, job’s a good ‘un.
Could I find the glue? Could I buggery. Another 20 minutes spent searching the entire building for some glue, and I’m starting to get a teensy bit pissed off here. This shop has been without a PC for four days now, and any orders placed since last Thursday haven’t been processed yet. I have a closer look at the switch. I wonder if I can wedge something behind it to stop it moving? I have a look around the office. There aren’t any centimetre-square bits of wood handy, and a bit of polystyrene wouldn’t be strong enough.
I decide in the end to cut up some cardboard and wedge it behind the switch. It’s while I’m doing this that someone comes in saying “Have you got any superglue?” I discard all the snide comebacks in favour of “no, I’ve been looking for it for the past half an hour myself!” (keeping my cool remarkably well, I thought). “Oh”, he says, “Someone told me you had some.” Well, someone was wrong. Anyway, cardboard jammed in, PC re-assembled and time for the moment of truth. This had better work, otherwise I’m going to throw the whole lot at the next person who comes in the door.
Fortunately the next person was safe, as the PC booted up normally. It switched on and off like a dream. So far I’ve fixed broken power switches with sticky tape, glue and now small pieces of cardboard. What next, I wonder? Ritual dances? Midnight sacrifices to the Great God Dell?
Time for lunch. Relax and breathe.
After lunch, phone another branch and try to sort out the problem they told me about yesterday morning, which I’ve only just got round to looking at. I can’t work out from their description what the problem is, so I told them I’d connect to their computer and see the problem for myself.
I connected without any problem, but could I see their screen on mine? Could I buggery. So instead of looking into the problem with their system, I spend the next two hours trying to work out why PC Anywhere is only showing me a black screen instead of the user’s desktop. I’m on the phone to the shop staff, telling them what to do on their screen. “Click here, select this, tell me what it says, change it to that, click OK” and we keep retrying the connection. Is it the modem speed? Is it the screen resolution? Is it the modem driver? No, no and thrice no. Of course, the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that customers keep walking in to the shop and the staff have to hang up the phone to go deal with them. Bloody customers, always getting in the way of everything. Two hours later and I still can’t see their screen, and I still don’t know what’s causing the error I was trying to look at in the first place. I can’t pass the buck to someone else because there’s no-one else in the department to pass it to.
Grrrr.
Still, it’s not been a complete waste of the day. Just the afternoon. I wonder if the sun is shining? I could do with burning off some frustration on the bike this evening.

Ok I’ve found something work-related to have a rant about.
Why oh why oh why (oh why) can people never follow simple instructions? Without trying to give too much away about where I work, I’ll just say that part of my job involves printing out letters for our customers basically inviting them to come back in to our stores and spend some more money. Each store maintains its own database of customers, and I get a backup of all their data once a fortnight and use it to print off the latest batch of letters. We print a main letter for customers due back in now, and a follow-up letter six weeks later if we still haven’t heard from them.
Of course, over time people move, die and so on, so if a store receives notification that we’re not to write to someone again, they should edit the customer record and replace the first line of the address with a row of X’s.
After that, any customer with an address that starts with “XX” won’t get another letter. Grieving widows are left to their grief, new householders aren’t pestered with mail for people that don’t live there any more, our data gets a bit more up to date and everyone’s happy.
So how come when I print a second letter a few weeks later I have to sort them out and remove all the ones addressed to Mr Smith at ********** or X XXXX XXXXX or 22 XXXXX or ++++++++++ or any other combination of incomplete addresses?
Surely it’s not that complicated, is it? Or am I living in la-la land expecting people to understand “replace the address with rows of X’s”?

A couple of readers have asked me to blog more about work…. I must admit I’m a bit nervous about doing this, as you never know who is reading. But, if I don’t mention anyone’s name or the name of the company, and I don’t mention anything too slanderous, I think I’ll be ok.
[edit]
I wrote a few paragraphs about work, read them back to myself and even I was bored. To cut a long story short, I work hard, I work alone, I don’t have any gossip, the inane chat I hear coming from the accounts department on my left and the factory floor on my right drives me nuts, and I’m still skint at the end of the month.
I’m committed to installing a third party system that has been incompletely specified, poorly written, and is hard to use. All the staff that will have to use it will hate it from the word go. The only redeeming part of it from my point of view is that I had nothing to do with the setup of this project in the first place. We’ve started training a handful of staff on how to use the new system; one of them has already left, and another is on maternity leave. I have a new boss starting in a couple of weeks, maybe that’ll liven things up, but until then I’ll keep work stuff between the hours of nine and five. And since I don’t blog during work hours (much), then work is pretty much off-limits here too.
Unless you really really really want to hear it. If you’re having trouble sleeping, or want to find that perfect excuse to go and top yourself, then I’ll tell you. But I don’t want to be responsible for “I couldn’t take it any more, Dan’s incessant posting about his tedious dull dreary job has driven me to end it all. Just reading about it has sapped me of the will to live, I shudder to think what it’s doing to that poor bloke pictured at the top of the screen…”
Save yourselves from a fate worse than mind-numbing boredom. Don’t ask me to blog about work again.

…after a week off, and fortunately I wasn’t greeted by cries of “thank god you’re back! Can you fix this? Can you fix that?” Of course there were some things that didn’t go 100% smoothly in my absence, but they didn’t take long to sort out, and nothing stopped the maufacturing side of things. So all in all a rather good situation to be in – I’m still most definately needed, but they can survive a few days without me.
We interviewed for a new IT Manager a couple of weeks back, they’ve chosen a guy and he’s accepted the job. He starts three weeks today, so it will be interesting to see how he settles in, and it will also take some of the pressure off me to do absolutely everything IT-related around here!
The only downside of coming back to work is that it’s an absolutely gorgeous day out there, perfect for a bike ride. I’ll have to hope that it stays this nice until I get home, so that I can get a few miles in this evening.

Despite everything I wrote in yesterday’s post, I can see where my ex is coming from. Although she’s no longer technically a single parent (she’s got a new fiance) she is still on a limited income and our son does need school dinners and clothes and everything else.
To cap it all, I’m not bringing home as much as I was when we were married, due in no small part to the fact that I was demoted at work a couple of years ago. Let me tell the story of how that happened.
At the time, I was the IT Manager, and tried to keep everyone happy. I thought my career was on the up, I had a company car and health benefits, and had earned a couple of decent pay rises in the previous couple of years.
We weren’t that bothered about software licencing or copying the occasional cd for other people at work. This proved to be my downfall. The place where I work is split into an office section and a factory section. One day, someone from the factory came through to tell me that a friend of theirs was starting a computer course and asked me what they’d need. This information was very vague, but I offered to do him a copy of Windows 98 anyway. This I did (at the end of the day when it was quiet) and off he went. He came back in a couple of days later to tell me that Windows 98 wasn’t what he was after in the first place, and it was while we were discussing the matter that one of the directors came through with the morning post. We have very hands-on company directors. The director wanted to know why this guy wasn’t at his station, and it all kicked off from there.
I was suspended pending an investigation (this wasn’t the first time I’d clashed with the directors over my managerial style, and I already had warnings and disciplinings [is that a word?] on my file). The chairman’s first reaction was “Fire him! Get rid of him!” but then they realised that I was the only person in the building who knew how the IT department worked. I went back in a week later for my hearing.
I pointed out that copying software wasn’t exactly frowned upon, and that I had in fact installed unlicenced software on the directors own pc’s (work pc for one director, personal laptop for another one) at their request. As a result of this, they could only discipline me for unauthorised use of company equipment, i.e. using the cd-writer to copy the disc. I was brought back on a four-month contract which would run up to December, in order to document the systems and give me time to look for another job. I was allowed to keep the company car, but lost health benefits (and had to take a hefty pay cut).
At this time my assistant was a man in his late 50′s who had a lot of IT experience. There has never been more than two people in the IT department here. He’d been working for us for about a year, and took the role of IT assistant as he was looking for something less stressful as he wound down his career until retirement. He was immedaitely promoted to IT Manager, a position he never wanted in the first place. The company hired a new guy in his late teens (not quite a school leaver, he already had 12 months experience working elsewhere) to be the new IT assistant. Part of my duties was to train him up in the day-to-day operations of the department.
All this happened after my marriage had falling apart, but before the divorce had come through. During the last few months of 2002 I was in the situation where my wife had asked for a divorce, I was about to move into a house of my own and I didn’t know if I’d have a job after Christmas. This is a whole other story, but I’d put in an offer on this house in November 2001. I couldn’t move in until I’d saved enough for the deposit and the current owners had found somewhere else to move to. This took until August 2002, during which time I was back living with my parents. At the age of 30-whatever-it-was.
Anyway, back at work, the directors employed somone else in a role not related to the IT department, and he needed a car. He was given mine. Since my contract specified a car, they got me a replacement. I went from driving a 10-month-old 1.8 litre family car to a 10-year-old 1-litre shopping trolley rustbucket. Still, it was transport, of sorts.
At the start of December they told me they were actually quite happy with my work and offered me a further six months. Since I didn’t have anything else to go to, I accepted.
At the end of January, the new assistant was given the boot. He turned out to be quite difficult to work with, and they let him go at the end of his three-month probationary period. I was told that I could have a full-time job with them again once my six months was up. Also at the end of January my car was stolen by joy-riders and trashed. They got me another replacement, which was another 10-year-old rustbucket.
Towards the end of the six month contract (this would be June 2003) I was told the terms and conditions of my new full-time employment. My job title would be IT Administrator, but there would be no company car. Bugger. But there was a ray of sunshine. They were going to give me the 10-year-old rustbucket! Free, gratis, and for nothing. I was mightily impressed, I can tell you. Not. They would also give me an extra £750 a year to cover running expenses for the car. £750 does not cover tax and maintenance on any car, no matter how old or new it is.
I kept the car until the end of the year. I had to get rid of it before it’s MOT was due at the end of the year (for the benefit of overseas readers, the MOT is an annual test of a vehicle’s roadworthiness). I remortgaged my house (it had doubled in value over the previous 24 months, finally something was going my way) so I was able to get myself something decent to drive. I still have this car and I’m extremely happy with it.
I put the rustbucket into an auction. After the auctioneer had taken his fee, I got £27 for it. I spend more than that on a tank of fuel each week.
With the marriage falling apart, getting demoted, moving out of my 3-bed semi-detached suburban home into my parents house and then into my current four-roomed house, and everything else that’s happened to me in the last three years or so, I think I’m holding up pretty well. Still need a big kick up my arse to get a new job, though.

Here’s a snippet of an email I got at work today. I’ve had to edit it down a bit, to protect the guilty, and I’ve replaced the edited bits with a description of what I’ve taken out in [square brackets]
Hi Daniel,
Please find attached the file: [ here he puts a file name, followed by some installation instructions ]
Any problems please don’t hesitate to call me.
Cheers
Adam
>>> Simon
Adam
Just had a quick look at the above customer’s files and think we may be able to get away with the following:
[ followed by the same file and installation instructions ]
—————————————-
Now, do you think Adam should have removed Simon’s comments from the bottom of the email before forwarding it on to me (the customer in question).
We all know that support companies sometimes take an educated – or not-so-educated – guess at what the customer’s problem might be, but it should be obvious to try and hide the fact that they’re guessing from the customer!

The week started manic, got a little quieter in the middle and ended on a manic note as well. I spent all morning connecting to each of our branches individually to pick up their orders as the email and ftp server were unavailable. They’ve been unavailable since lunchtime yesterday, something to do with someone wanting to change a block of IP addresses and everything behind that block of addresses falling off the edge of the internet. So at least it wasn’t just us that was affected (and I wasn’t responsible for it, hehehe) but I still have to pick up the pieces after the fact.
We get all the orders in by lunchtime. So next week we’re going to move to a newer more robust more available more up to date more whizz bang fantastic ftp and email server. Which means I’m going to have to connect to all the branches all over again to change their connection settings. That gives me something to look forward to over the weekend, don’t you think?