Most annoying/unnecessary task at work?

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Having worked for a number of places, I can safely say the current one is the crappiest. And the real sand grains in my gearbox are the sheer number of nontechnical and/or utterly unnecessary tasks we, as technical operators, are expected to do.

This includes, but is not limited to -

* Cut-n-pasting text from email to tickets, without actually addressing the issues

* Having an email-forwarding procedure which consists of several hundred clicks, keystrokes and cut-n-pastes

* Having to manually extract the same keywords from tickets every time any of the multiple thousand staff is hired or leaves the company

* Having to manually process multiply-redundant paperwork several times over every time any of the multiple thousand staff requests a network security group, a standard software package, or any type of hardware

* Having people and teams too lazy to type their own damn tickets send us email saying "Log this up and send it back would you, peons? Chop chop."

Most of these tasks should be fully automated. All of them should be being done by administrative personnel, not techies. Many of them are actually completely and totally unnecessary - I've traced the workflows between teams and they loop back on themselves.

Another example: To have a phone handset replaced onsite, a user calls Group 1, who calls us (Group 2), who calls the company with the contract for that site (Group 3), who sends it back down to Group 1 with an authorisation code, who then allocates it to Group 4 (who is usually Group 1 under a different name), who then replaces the handset maybe a week later.

Don't even ask about replacing a mouse. That's the same procedure, except two additional levels of management, a procurement team and a shipping company get involved as well.

So - have you heard of worse?

Comments

[jecook]

O.o And I thought some of the paperwork here was bad.

Actually, come to think about it, a lot of the paperwork here is needed for compliance reasons, but it's really quite streamlined, actually.

You want worse?

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

When I first started as tech support at a high school, my team were fully expected to repair the blinds in the classrooms, as well as the chairs. Certain of the teaching staff still expect us to be responsible for them.

We were also expected to do all the electrical testing for the school (something which, by UK law, requires you to have certain training which we've never had), and all the telephone maintenance - including wiring.

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

At a former job, we had a bunch of laptops that were ~2 years old, but still entirely usable except for the batteries. We had a bunch of them scattered across departments, so I suggested to my manager that we figure out how many were needed organization-wide (a few dozen, maybe) and then see if we could get a bulk discount. My manager agreed that this was a good idea.

I heard nothing else about it. My laptop's battery was good for less than 15 minutes, making it pretty useless as a laptop. After a month or two, I asked my manager about it, and I could tell from his face that he was a broken man.

Apparently, this innocent suggestion had spawned dozens of hours of meetings, with furious disagreements about whether it was a good idea or how the order would be paid for. They probably spent more on personnel costs arguing than the batteries would have cost. Eventually, it was agreed that they'd all order separately because they couldn't figure out how to split a bill in the accounting system.

[wignersfriend.livejournal.com]

I work at a start-up. I was the second of two infrastructure guys, our position is to handle the servers, desktops, accounts, software licenses and security.

About a month ago (a month into my employment), I was put in charge of running our outbound dialer [telemarketing] and informational e-mail [spam] campaigns as well as assembling (TPS) reports. I find it a little ironic that my first duty at the company was to configure the spam filter on our mail server.

Come to think of it, our CEO does look a bit like Gary Cole.

At least there isn't much paperwork in such a small company. I just find it annoying that I'm expected to do these extra duties that have nothing near to do with my job description.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Heh. Did you 'accidentally' configure it over the outgoing as well as incoming feeds?

[tecie.livejournal.com]

yes... I used to work for the government and for several well known megacorps (I work for one now but I think I'm high enough up the support chain now to justify playing dumb to the rules)
The worst was a very well known tech megacorp for whom I did SAP Batch Ops for in one of their data centers. There was a strong push to get the jobs out of the US, so management was very serious about making our jobs as streamlined as possible. When I say streamlined, I mean that management from very high up wanted scripted phone monkeys doing this work. The harder management pushed for a streamlined process, the worse things got because techs were getting harassed for doing their jobs and not filling out paperwork. This of course played right into managements hands, since as people quit, new people would come in who were unqualified or would jump ship first chance they got, which ultimately drove up the cost of holding people on. Essentially the process, from my perspective, appeared to be in place solely for the purpose of building the case to close more ops centers in the US.
The paperwork included but was not limited to:
1) Insisting that written procedures be followed, even when they didn't exist or didn't apply. I used to get tickets for daemon down on a system that was checked by the level 1 tech by pinging the server in question. If they couldn't ping the server (not an uncommon scenario in a corporate firewalled environment) then they would immediately open a high severity ticket to my group. The problem was the level one group wasn't logging into the server to see if the daemons were running.
2) Adding extra people to the process. They were calling them "duty managers" when I left, but I'm sure some other cute name has been made up for them by now. These people were supposed to "run the problem" so us techs could do the work. A nice idea, if these people had some sort of clue as to the nature of the problems that they were overseeing. It felt like a hot potato -- whoever had to esculate a problem to one of these idiots would be stuck in a side chat with the DM for the WHOLE PROBLEM, which could of course drag on for hours, or occasionally days, explaining what to do and how to run the problem. This would continue even after I could conclusively prove that it wasn't my problem and that the other people involved had to do their thing and could resolve the issue without my intervention, because the DM would decide by that point that I was their friend. The flip side to it would be the occasional DM who would decide that they were clearly in charge and take no input from anyone at all, which would lead to a side chat with everyone except the DM quickly starting so we could all work on the issues. There were lots of other utterly pointless people who could be dragged in as well... but you get the point.
3) Multiple ticket systems, each one with different data in it. I've seen this at every tech job I've had the last five years. Every time there's some critical problem going on and someone who is vitally important to the process spends 25 minutes trying to read through the tickets before someone takes pity and tries to give the abbrieviated version over the phone.
4) Politics: by far the worst threat to getting anything done. "Person A won't help you with the problem because Person A had a fight with Person B..." or even better is when people try lying to one another and using your position to help their lie.

[canray.livejournal.com]

Telling New Yorkers that their TV Service was disconnected due to Non-Payment, and would be turned back on when we get the money.

No, not when you SEND the money, when we GET the money.

Money, not cheque, money.

Yes, that means we have to wait until the Accounting Department makes the bank run, which they only do once a month.

And then a week for the bank to process the cheque.

And we have to get the cheque first, it did not teleport from the mailbox to our mail room.

No, you may not disturb my Supervisor about this, he's busy with something important and doesn't have time to repeat what I just said.

Again, your TV is off because of non-payment.

No, TV is not an essential service, you do not need TV to live. Yes, I do know that the Phone is an essential service in the US, TV isn't.

What do I expect your family to do? I don't know, read maybe? Get a nice discussion meeting going? Go see a play?

Doesn't seem like much, when you have four days of *JUST* that issue in a row, for 8 hours a day... :-S

And for something that everyone understands, you don't pay your bills, bad things happen.