Thursday, April 03, 2008
If my company had a person in charge of designing ways to hamper productivity, they could not do a better job than the way it is now. So I figure, if they don't care about productivity, why should I work hard? Here are some of the roadblocks:
I'm not usually big on conspiracy theories, but part of me thinks these things are put in place, because if they were fixed we could get our work done quickly and then have nothing to do, and the bosses don't want to lose headcount in their little empires. And clearly, Mike Oxley and Paul Sarbannes are agents of the CHICOMS.
1) I must present/swipe my ID badge 3 times by the time I get to my desk. I used to have to have my bag x-ray'd.That's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure there are many more. I haven't even gotten to meetings. The impressive thing is that most of these things are relatively easy and inexpensive to remedy.
2) Half the elevators are broken. Elevator waiting time is usually around 5 mins.
3) They turned off Outlook auto-complete, yet all coworkers have extremely long and difficult to spell Indian and Russian names. Emailing a coworker is now an ordeal.
4) I still have a 17" CRT monitor. You can get a 24" LCD at Dell for $350, which at my hourly billing rate would be made up for in increased productivity the first week.
5) My computer is old, slow and poorly configured. Opening Firefox takes 2 minutes, I'm assuming because my profile is stored on some distant network drive.
6) In order to log in to the server to make a change, I have to first go to a website and fill out a request. This must be approved by my manager and sometimes by the business user. Afterwards I get a ticket number, which I can use to login.
7) But I can't log in directly. I have to go through a gateway, which gives me a list of all the servers and asks why I need access.
8) The list of servers is long, and they all have unintelligible alphanumeric names (would you like to log in to GBSSPANY01, GBSSPDAY02, SDFKJWER01, or SDFSEWSFD03)? I can never remember which one is production, QA, development, or one of the many databases. Every other company gives the servers an easy to remember alias according to some theme.
9) Once I am in, the location of our files differs for each server. On Dev is in /home1, in QA it's in /home5, in production it's in /home7. I can never remember which directory to go to for the changes.
10) Logging in from home requires three passwords, a PIN, a secureID, and remembering my work desktop computer name (fwfunyw421532). And then it allows me to remotely use my work desktop over the internet, which is extremely slow and almost unusable. Because of this I do not check my email from home.
11) There are 10 people within 20 feet of me, normally having loud conversations with each other. As soon as I get some concentration going, someone inevitably comes over to talk about some funny YouTube video.
12) Everyone in the group is CC'd on every email. Many of them are automated batch emails, saying THERE IS NO PROBLEM. Why do I need an email when there is no problem? I now get almost 1000 emails a day, of which 10 are relevant to me. So now I have an inbox rule that automatically deletes anything that was not sent specifically to me, which means I am the last to know when someone brought in cookies.
I'm not usually big on conspiracy theories, but part of me thinks these things are put in place, because if they were fixed we could get our work done quickly and then have nothing to do, and the bosses don't want to lose headcount in their little empires. And clearly, Mike Oxley and Paul Sarbannes are agents of the CHICOMS.
