Burden of competence?

[omg-teh-funnay.livejournal.com]

Don't mean to flood the group, but thought you all might enjoy this one...


One of my leads approached me with a question yesterday about printing shipping labels to the laptop lab, so that we don't have to run back and forth. He needed a way to specify what was going on with said labels. This makes no sense to me, really, because we have to deliver printed tickets to the lab, and we bring the preprinted labels with us. Apparently, no more.

I recommend a separator page to identify the print jobs. Used them at another company. He tells me to run with that and make it happen. Crap. Now I have to build a separator page for our department. 12 seconds on google, I have the directions on making one. 5 minutes later, I print a test run on my local machine. Success! I show the lead, he wants two versions, for both types of lappy images we build. 2 more minutes, I have two versions. Problem is that each printer can only have one separator page... so the workaround is to create two printers - one for each job type.

Today, it got deployed.

Today, I realized that my coworkers are... words fail me

They want more options

They want the customer's account info, problem description and ticket number to show up.

For each ticket.

They want the banner to say different things, depending on what the problem is.

And they can't figure out how to do it. None of them looked up the file format, they just hacked it together, using copy/paste and did it wrong. Broke my files. Then came whining to me to fix it. So I rebuilt it, but then we have to have a different .sep file for each possible thing. This is 8 variations (2 software images, 4 different platforms), and it means a new installed printer for each .sep file. It doesn't do the dynamic data that they want. Their solution? Edit the .sep file for EACH print job.

All this to avoid walking tickets over to the depot. Hell, I recommended bundling the tickets and the shipping labels together into a PDF doc, but that got shouted down soundly as 'too complicated'

While I was working on this issue (as much as I didn't want to, my big fat mouth got me into this mess), one of my enterprising coworkers saw how I was testing and decided to 'help' - there's nothing like realizing someone's managed to submit 10 test prints in an attempt to 'help' - the printer's owner was getting pissed off at the amount of wasted paper

Good news is that I no longer have to worry about it It's all them now. Good luck, kids!

Comments

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

Fun little acronym I learned during my stay in the military.

NAVY = Never Again Volunteer Yourself.

It works in the civilian tech world too! ;)

I bet you didn't get a single damn extra dollar for your idea either.

[benatwork.livejournal.com]

Yup. I learned that at work as well. No good deed goes unpunished, particularly if it's a continuing favor that's been rescinded.