Gangbanged!

My dear fellow bloggers, this is not an X-rated themed post, although the odd profanity may make its way to the text. Instead, it's a pretty accurate description of how my co-workers and I feel after this weekend at work.

A more accurate description would by "gangbanged by a Viagra overdosed horde of elephants, freshly released from a ten year sexual drought". Yes! That's more like it.

I find stock taking a tedious, boring, but nevertheless important part of working life. It comes once or twice a year, and everyone is mentally prepared for getting bored senseless of trying to find stuff and accounting for any kinds of variances. So how do you make it more interesting to the staff?

Well, our gracious employers, always considering the best way of maintaining the spirits of the staff high during such periods, this year came up with an alternative plan! At the end of it, they planned the live introduction of an additional software package, designed to make our lives easier, and reducing the manual input of data to our ERP system.

It has been a project going on for the past four, perhaps five months. There have been meetings upon meetings, discussions upon discussions covering the length of the project, including a whole one hour (!) training session for the people who are going to be using it. It was during that training session, that we all realised we were dead meat! We raised questions about the procedures, the input method and so on and so forth. The software company representative who was giving us the training had an answer for each of our questions.

Yet answers of the type: "They didn't mention you need this!", "We were not requested to cover that kind of situation", "Is that what actually happens?", are hardly reassuring that all is well in the western front!

Come last Sunday every tiniest fear we had that we were totally screwed, was finally realised!

We finished our stock taking by 09.30am and then it was a matter of going live on the new system.

To be fair, the first couple of tests gave excellent results. We were cooking with gas!

Were we f..k!!! When it came to linking to our ERP, you could actually smell the foul scent of shit, while listening to the deafening sound of it hitting the proverbial fan! 11.45am the whole process ground to a halt, while the IT guys were trying to sort out the issue.

It was a slow and painful experience that went on and on. Five coffees later, hours and hours of SQL-what the hell it is I don't even want to know-we were getting a dim bright spot at the end of a quite long tunnel! In the meantime, several of the staff were excused to leave and join their families, for whatever was left to them of the Sunday afternoon. I went around the premises seeking for the dog - she has not been seen since Saturday and I fear she has met with some kind of ill fortune from the mongrels in the vicinity of our offices - then watched a helicopter do water drops on a rubbish pit fire 300 yards away, and then sat on my desk and doodled some tropical island scene.

The sun descended into the horizon, but we were still there, by now struggling with the communication between the software packages. To cut a long story short, some kind of a breakthrough came by 11.45pm, and we all decided to call it a day.

Monday was going to be better, we reassured each other, while getting into our cars. Was it f..k?

Come Monday morning we realised that although the two systems were communicating, they were exchanging information of no use to each other! Wait! Wait! It gets better!!!!

Lots of IT fiddling going on, the whole premises ground to a halt, and the phones starts to ring. Our inter company customers were calling to find out whether our logistics department was going to meet their needs! Ha! Fat chance! Not in your lifetime dude! Not with this kind of project preparation!

It turns out that our new super duper package can do virtually anything you ask it to do. It's a real pity, though, that during all these months of running the project, nobody considered looking at our procedures, nobody thought it would be worth their while to if not ask, at least sit in a corner and take notes of how the department works.

As a result, we are now three days into the system going live, we have managed to cover about 20% of our work, and the paperwork raised requires a small army of personnel for data entry alone! It is like someone came to your house, decided to use your stove to bake you a cake, and demolished your kitchen while doing it!

This is a big mess that will take some time to set straight, especially with virtually half of the people due to go on leave in August! Perhaps the Chinese proverb says "may you live in interesting times" but this is pretty much ludicrous. Bloody Greeks, taking things to extremes again!

Helicopter putting out fire across our offices

My island retreat doodle