I received a sort of reprimanding email as to why I have not filled out some survey that the Megacorp Financial and IT audit folks want me to fill out. I called the guy and said I don't know what you are talking about. He explained it to me and it made sense (in a retarted Megacorp sort of way) so I went to the surveymonkey link and did the survey.
I fully expect a call from these people soon. Why? Well, the 3rd question (after my name and location and stuff like that) was how many Business UNIT (lets say XYZ for example sake) IT employees are there at my location. I work at the XYZ headquarters. You would think this is an easy question but, in the Megacorp world, it is not. I went to my boss, the VP of Finance and asked him. We agreed there are Zero XYZ IT employees. How can that be, you ask, because me and the other 2 IT people here are IT people right? Well, we are IT people but we are not XYZ IT people. We are transitional SmallCorp IT people who will all be gone before January 1st of 2005.
Whoever reads this survey is surely going to be confused as to how the survey was filled out with ZERO IT people. Who filled it out? Another funny question was has there been any major changes in IT staffing in the last 12 months or so? Well, yes there have. 17 people went to 3, Sounds pretty major to me. Smallcrop became the XYZ part of Megacorp and 14 people were let go and the 3 that are here do not work for XYZ.
Our office has some sales and marketing people, some executives, and that's it. Like 30 people total. This survey is for them to figure out of they really need to audit us or not. Jeez.... lets fly like 2 people 800 miles for a week to audit 30 people who have no servers, no major systems, and who can barely attach a file to email, much less become expert hackers and take down the whole Megacorp network. All the users here have PC's and all those PC's are centrally managed from the Megacorp datacenter.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me here at Megacorp how screwed up this crap is. For example, I had to buy some computer components. So, I go on the megacorp mall and pick the Boise Technology site. I pick 9 things I need (tape drive, SCSI card, Memory, tapes... and so on). I view my cart and it's all correct. I then to go checkout which transfers the stuff from my Boise cart to my Megacorp Megamall application. I get an error about some cross reference thing.
So, I call their help desk. I tell them my error. 4 hours later I get an email from someone saying I received the error because one of the items I was trying to buy is not set up properly in their system. I have to do a manual purchase thing for that item. So, I ask this person which of the 9 items is not set up and they can't tell me.
Now, this manual purchase things sucks!!!!! Totally. It would be faster to steal what I need, get caught, go to court, serve time in prison and then get released than to try and get it the round-about way. It took me 2 hours to find what I needed (the web based screens draw SOOOOOO SLOW!!!). The descriptions pretty much suck. About 10% of them are wrong (a 120GB hard drive was listed as a resistor. Go figure). Most descriptions say shit like "western digital hard drive" or " Seagate Hard drive".... no capacity, no interface info, no rotational speed. So, after screwing with this 2 hours I guess I will have to create a separate requisition for each and every item. I will then have to submit each and take note of which one gives the error.
Yeah, this is progress. Back before Megacorp I would call my vendor and say "Larry, I need this tape drive and this SCSI card and a 120Gb drive and this SCSI cable and 2GB of RAM for this type of system. He would find all the numebrs and send me the crap in a day or two. It would take me 10 minutes. Now, it takes me 2 hours and I am not even done yet because of this error.
And the prices!! HAHAH!! GIve me a break. This online Megamall site is selling a 20GB IDE hard disk for $99!! What the hell is up with that? Most other items seem to be overpriced as well. My only wonder is how is this saving Megacorp any money?
Megacorp (I call them the Great Satan now), has lots of contractors. Like most super-huge firms, there is always some contractors here screwing up this and that. Anyway, today one of the Oracle contractors comes down to me asking me if I have a copy of Project 2000 I can load on his system. Luckily for me, I do not.
All I have to say is what the fuck? The Great Satan (Megacorp), is probably paying $200 per hour for these oracle rubes to be here. I am not sure if they are actually from oracle or, just some dudes that say they know it. In any case, they are not working cheap and Project 2000 is something they surely would have needed in the past and for future projects? Why does this slack-jaw not have his own? It's sort of like going to a doctor for a checkup and then havimg him send you a bill for having to buy a stethescope. Why should my company pay for such basic business software as this for this guy to have on his PC and then use for the next client 3 months from now?
As a person who works on numerous projects here and there, you would think a consultant would have either the consulting firm he work's for would supply him with such basic business software as this or, he would drop the $400 and buy it himself. Maybe tomorrow he will come by and ask me if I have a copy of Word I can load for him.