Recently, I have been on the engagement from hell. Okay, they are ALL engagements from hell, but this one is very special. Not for the reasons specified below, but for many others.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is not why I bring you here today. I want to alleviate all of your concerns about how safe your money is in our great, private institutions during these scary economic times.
You see, the majority of those with whom I work are in the banking and healthcare industry. And we aren’t talking puny little people. We are talking the biggies. So when I tell you I am here to give you comfort, I can back it up.
In order for me to give you that comfort, as Jesus learned very quickly, parables are the best way to convey that information. So below is a parable of my own.
“Oh ye, little lambs under the oppresive economic situation of the United States of America, come, sit under the tree of knowledge and share with me this story. Listen, as I tell you the truth of what is going on around you; that the pharisees do NOT want you to know.
Though lowly commoner that I am, I find myself surrounded by bank executives, creating intelligence reports so that the economic decision makers that be can make better decisions for you and me. And lo, I work hard for my currency that pays my landlord for my humble abode.
Upon delivering such ‘intelligent’ reports for said executives who are responsible for the safety of our money, I am returned armed with frustration from said executives. These executives are frustrated, because these reports, which will save the economic lives of you and I, do not share the same report title sizing upon viewing.
Lo, diligently, I try to determine the cause of such a heinous complaint. However, there is no issue to be found. After communicating back and forth, after two weeks, the executives explain to me that it should be clear to me that we are discussing printing visibility, NOT viewing visibility.
After bleeding appropriately for my inability to read minds, I reviewed all pixel sizes for over an hour, and attempted to print out said reports to compare the psychotic noisings of bank executives.
Upon printing and within seconds of determining the problem, I found myself rolling on the floor, and could not stop. I had immediately become possessed by a spirit, which could not be exhumed by myself; a spirit of laughter. This spirit could only be removed from me by sharing the story with as many people as possible.
Therefore, I picked up the phone and called my other developers.
I explained to them that the executives were choosing to print the legal-sized report on letter paper, which is resizing the document when printing. Doing so would of course, resize the title and all other information on the report. Now, why would this be an issue? Because the report is a legal-sized document. And it is quite visibly a legal-sized document when viewing it in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Now, you may ask me, oh commoner, how did you handle the expulsion of the laughter demon, and how did you handle the conveyance of such information back to the bank executives for such folly? And how did the executives handle such an embarrassing oversight?
Well, the demon persists to this day. I found that the demon is a part of my personality, and I rather like him.
I conveyed the information back to the client as nicely as I could, and tried not to sound like a complete asshole.
The client actually did not think they did anything wrong. They blamed the tool, and didn’t understand that those were settings in Adobe Acrobat reader, and thought that we should somehow code into the report such that Acrobat reader prints it out a certain way. “
So I assure you, your money is completely safe in the hands of banking executives. As long as you do not ask them to print out pdfs, or anything banal that requires an IQ of say, oh, 30.
And from that, I was dismissed from the project for being a poor developer (among other non-sensical mistakes on the client’s behalf that were, of course, my fault). Of course, I was categorically mandated to work through every holiday we had, I was forced to cancel my vacation, and we worked 7×18 every day since Thanksgiving. And from that, you can imagine that my resume is going to be updated this week while I am on vacation (think medical leave).
1 response so far ↓
1 laughingattheslut // Feb 6, 2010 at 8:41 am
Hey, you’re back, sort of.
Well, we have had all sorts of problems with banks and credit cards and so on, and to be fair most of them were our fault. That is to say, that we haven’t had any money and we haven’t paid our bills.
But there were a few things that I just don’t see how anyone gets away with. We have had accounts at a certain bank for many years, though we did not originally open an account there, just that the original bank was taken over by someone else, but the someone else has mostly be satisfactory until recently.
When things were good, we had some automatic things set up, both with the bank and with various credit card companies and other places that receive money from us on a regular basis. And this all works very well, when things are good, and you have money. When you don’t have money, and people try to collect money that you don’t actually have, there are fees.
So, we thought that until things were better, we should cancel all the automatic payments and transfers and such. We should go back to writing actual checks to pay bills and using actually cash to buy other stuff.
At some point we decided that we couldn’t pay the credit cards for a while. There was X amount of money coming in, and X amount of money getting spent on rent and cars and food and such, and there wasn’t enough left over to pay most of the credit cards, and so we apoligized to most of them and said we hoped to work something out when things got back to normal.
And then we thought things were back to normal, and we made arrangements with most of the credit card companies. But “back to normal” was temporary, and again we apoligized and stopped paying the cards.
One of the cards kept collecting money from the bank. We couldn’t put a stop to it, cause for some reason my husband just let them take money without writing a paper check as we had agreed, and he lost some number or something, and the bank just kept paying them.
Okay, if we can’t cancel on the credit card end, we should talk to the bank and cancel on that end. But nothing we did seemed to work, and we lost an entire paycheck over fees and such.
Finally, if the bank wouldn’t help us, and they were just going to keep paying the credit card company even though we instructed them not to and they could see that we didn’t have the money, we would have to close our account and take our business elsewhere.
Someone sent us a direct deposit by mistake. The deposit was made, which reopened our account, and again the credit card was paid and fees were paid and so forth.
We have had to cancel this same account three times, in writing, and in person, and it still just never seems to go away.
My credit card problems would just take too long to get into.
It has been a very strange experience. And we still owe everyone money.
Come on man. You know you want to say something!