Friday! back where it belongs, perfect
BOFH: The Great HellDesk geek leave seek
"Well that would be on the form, surely?" the H.R. person burbles smugly over the phone. "It sort of is," the HellDesk user replies, "only it's hard to see because the characters are all blurred." "They'll be blurred because your browser doesn't support downloadable fonts," H.R. replies in a know-it-all tone. "What browser …
COMMENTS
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Friday 20th February 2015 15:09 GMT Anonymous Custard
This sounds horribly familiar
Sounds like our old expenses system at work, which was so long and convoluted, and with so many approvals and sign-offs that getting expenses actually paid sometimes took 2-3 months.
It only got "sorted out" when some of us started putting in expense claims for the interest on our personal credit cards that we had to use for funding the original expenditure (as we're obviously not trustworthy enough to have company cards...), as we weren't getting the money back in time to actually pay the things off on time.
Our current system is a bit better (and somewhat quicker), but it's still going to be interesting to see if the beancounters realise how long filling in a claim takes, when done during worktime at the hourly rate I get paid ;)
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Friday 20th February 2015 17:13 GMT Richard Jones 1
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
Its OPEX only until the bean counters in collaboration with satin decide that some staff costs should be capitalised because of the projects they are working on.
And then the expense codes all have to be changed on the special Excel form someone in Outer Mongolia developed but the system throws a wobbly because staff costs and expenses should be OPEX not CAPEX. The staff cost centre has not been changed to a capitalised one as some staff still work on routine work. However, this problem only comes to light when the claim is stuck in the system having been approved via the wizzy system of pass the electronic parcel and the approvals cannot be unwound; because unwinding never happens its not been coded for...
and
the £2,000 plus bill cannot be paid because the refund is delayed
then the disciplinary hounds chase up the unpaid credit card bill.
Oh yes, suddenly my lot decided that expenses were not worth the hassle so no one went anywhere, "xyz have a specialist team for doing that".
Meanwhile hell is waiting to freeze over.
It became clear that the company had lost the plot completely.
I kept a record of how much extra annual pension I earned with each day at the office, it was the only way to keep sane.
Then early retirement was never more welcome.
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Sunday 22nd February 2015 10:22 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
"bean counters in collaboration with satin" (satin?)
When I was in the Civil Service Satan was the Inland Revenue (or vice versa). There was always some, apparently new, IR regulation as to why this wasn't an allowable journey, even when the reasoning contradicted that given for disallowing the previous journey.
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Friday 20th February 2015 17:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
Reminds me why my IT budget was so much bigger when i managed to lease everything and pushed as much to OPEX as possible. spend spend spend. watch the Bean counters email so you can leave or arrange a mechanical failure in the lift or explicit emails from said bean counter to CFO before it gets Flagged.
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Friday 20th February 2015 16:06 GMT big_D
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
Sounds like our old expenses system at work, which was so long and convoluted, and with so many approvals and sign-offs that getting expenses actually paid sometimes took 2-3 months.
I was lucky, when I started work, it was same day.
I had a credit card with a 250 quid limit (I was 19), I was working away for 12 weeks and each weeks hotel bill, including meals came to between 240 and 250 quid... So that meant rushing back from Plymouth to Southampton on a Friday afternoon, filling out the expenses, grabbing the cash and going to the back on Saturday, so that I could use the card again the next week!
I tried getting the limit raised, but I hadn't had the card long enough, so I had to do the same dance every week!
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Friday 20th February 2015 17:28 GMT Rampant Spaniel
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
Amen. A certain UK cable company had an amusing process for reimbursement. You filed it the form online and v printed it (out also registered the claim in the payroll system pending verification). Then you photocopied your receipts. All sane so far. Then it had to be sent in a special 'expenses envelope' which we like the proverbial hens teeth. They rejected any requests in normal envelopes, they refused to send you envelopes and they shit entire housing estates worth of bricks when I got hold of an envelope and made duplicates on the colour copier. Amazing how quick they got me a stash of envelopes when I refused to buy anything myself.
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Friday 20th February 2015 18:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
I once worked for a company that did credit cards; unfortunately they didn't have a specific "corporate card" product of their own (personal cards only) so refused to issue credit cards to anyone - everyone had to use their own for any expenses. However expense claims were only processed once a month and paid with normal pay packets the following month, so you could be paid up to 8 weeks after incurring the expense.
This may have been fine for the senior management on 6 figure salaries, but when they had a project with large numbers of more junior staff having to travel away 2-3 times a week at zero notice (so more expensive train fares) and also stay away from home sometimes 3-4 nights a week, that meant they were asking some staff to wait all that time to be reimbursed more than their monthly pay came to. When I left, that company were losing staff at the rate of 2 every 3 weeks, out of a total staff of under 200.
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Saturday 21st February 2015 07:10 GMT big_D
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
Most of out employees don't have credit cards (credit card penetration in Germany is around 30%). That means that most employees can't even push the expenses out to the end of the month.
But the company books the hotels and train tickets and they try to get as much as possible billed directly on invoice to the company. The employees also get a float to take with them for meals etc. whilst they are away.
That said, the rules in Germany are very tight and you get around 24€ for meals per day (if you are away for 24 hours) between 8 and 24 hours it is only 12€.
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Friday 20th February 2015 23:50 GMT DiViDeD
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
You should try being a contractor for a bank which shall remain nameless (the one whose offices are all in the Citi).
I wasn't entitled to a company credit card because I was a contractor, so I paid my own expenses and claimed them back. Only their expenses team could only reimburse Citi credit cards, so I got a Citi card. Only they could only reimburse if they had an employee number, which don't get issued to contractors....
By the time they agreed that I could invoice the company for my expenses I'd racked up A$12,300 (about £1.47) in expenses and was getting nasty letters about paying my credit card bill from the same bank that was holding the money!
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Friday 20th February 2015 17:12 GMT Warm Braw
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
At least homebrewed cock-ups can sometimes be "sorted out".
I once worked for a well-known provider of transport services in a large metropolitan area, whose employee interactions were mediated by a popular (with boardrooms) brand of "Enterprise Software". In all the time I was there, I was never able to complete a timesheet because even the expensive third-party consultants that had been brought in to wrestle the system into a state of basic utility were shrugging their shoulders helplessly.
I assume it's due to the amazing number of different ways you can render the message "The computer says no" in German that the suppliers had failed to translate so many of them into English.
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Saturday 21st February 2015 07:02 GMT big_D
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
I assume it's due to the amazing number of different ways you can render the message "The computer says no" in German that the suppliers had failed to translate so many of them into English
I had a customer who had an ERP system (that we weren't responsible for), which came from Germany. On Christmas Eve they got an error message that was one word, about 40 characters long!
The software company had closed for Christmas and nobody spoke German, so they tried the international operator, they couldn't help, but they then rang a German operator and they also couldn't make head nor tail of the word, but came up with a literal translation:
The first character is after the last character of the file. The techs then managed to work out that it was complaining that the import file was empty (EOF).
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Wednesday 25th February 2015 02:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This sounds horribly familiar
The company I still work at (hopefully not much longer) uses AMEX as the company card. To apply for it though, it goes on your credit report/score. I used to use it all the time for one off things that would come up; car repairs, doctors, corrective lenses, what have you.
I would always pay it and fill out the expense form in Oracle to reflect the personal expenditures.
One guy in my group tried to do that an fucked it up for the rest of us.
They called him to the carpet. He asked me to show him the correct way to do it. He then did it the correct way. They still called him to the carpet. He said he knew of other people doing it but they weren't getting in trouble.
Next thing we know, they send out a memo saying that the cards can only be used for business purposes. I went on AMEX and canceled my card, shredded it heavily (almost to a plastic powder) and sent it in an evelope to the department that handles the corp credit cards with a note that said Fuck You.
They are still trying to figure it out and they asked a bunch of us about it. Especially all of us that canceled our cards about the same time.
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Friday 20th February 2015 16:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
We used to have a time management tool like that. One day someone discovered they could divide activities into sub-tasks. He was bored, so booked sick leave as a series of activities like:
lying in bed
throwing up
lying in bed
rushing to bathroom
etc.
Someone else couldn't get a straight answer from his boss about what to charge to a customer, so he booked half a day as "pissing about". That one didn't go down so well...
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Friday 20th February 2015 21:25 GMT Number6
I remember being invited into the project manager's office along with a few others to witness him calling the accounts department to tell them that if they didn't get their act together and stop delaying our purchase orders (usually a problem around the end of a month) then he'd be telling his team to book to the waiting time overhead number if the stuff we'd ordered didn't arrive.
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Friday 20th February 2015 16:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Ah, the move to an online HR system.. ours is that good that they don't even have the correct certificate to authenticate the site so you have to add an exception. We must have a cheap supplier.. A/L use to have to be authorised by a manager but soon got dropped to our call centre team to do.
Yes the old system needed replacing, not by this though..
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Monday 23rd February 2015 15:56 GMT Tom 38
My employers moved from a hand rolled Lotus Notes DB for HR and someone handing out payslips for payroll, to an awful 3rd party software for HR and payroll is "in the cloud".
The HR software requires IE 7 or 8. The Payroll site requires IE 9+. Neither of them work in anything else, and I use FreeBSD...
Now that we don't have to maintain our own HR software.... we spend longer managing the updates that we pay the vendor for.
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Friday 20th February 2015 16:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
OH
My
Giddy
Aunt
I am suffering *_right_now_* the birth pangs of some oversold internal (anti)social networking that will "replace email" and make us "collaborative" and "more efficient", outsourced HR Helldesk and sundry other "gee whiz look at us being digital" niceties.
Will the burbles never learn?
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Friday 20th February 2015 16:42 GMT Sarah Balfour
Fer feck's sake Reg!
Gerrit sor'ed! I had BOFH and Dabbsy bookmarked, and then they both vamoosed - was beginning to worry that Dabbsy'd been collared by GCHQ. I've now found him by accident twice, and I usually end up reading him about a week late.
I don't take to change well. I don't take to owt well, as it goes.
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Friday 20th February 2015 17:15 GMT SteveK
Cryptoanalysing BOFH
I'm starting to think there's some sort of data encoded in the BOFH schedule - whether it appears on Friday or Saturday is clearly a binary state and then there's a variable number of weeks between episodes..
Or perhaps something is just telling me that it is pub-o-clock.
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Friday 20th February 2015 17:28 GMT bed
I had a company credit card too
With which I could buy things from Amazon, or e-bay, or whatever but not travel, hotels or general day-to-day expenses etc., for which I had to use my own credit card then, at the end of the month, endure a java front end to 'orible financials, print out the resultant information and post via the internal mail somewhere to be processed (not approved, that was done electronically), the money arriving in my bank account some time later. The process must have made sense to someone.
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Friday 20th February 2015 20:41 GMT Mark 85
Re: I had a company credit card too
Chances are, that if you had visited the finance department, there would have staff and printers and copier and file cabinets. All the paper generated via the computer would have been printed, copied and stored because they couldn't comprehend that the info would stay on the server. OTOH, most of those offices would prefer to still use quill pens and candles for light. I think the spirit of Scrooge is taken literally as an operations handbook instead of the morality tale it is.
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Saturday 21st February 2015 00:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I had a company credit card too
>The process must have made sense to someone.
It made sense to the beancounters who earned their annual bonus for demonstrating how much interest the company could earn by holding on to the money they owed for as long as legally possible.
Exactly. Some years back, I coded financial tools for a well known accounting program in use then. While working on a special project for one client, I found out from their bean counter, during a beverage lunch and development consultation session, why you get your paychecks after 14:00 on Friday. It was specifically so they could earn the interest over the weekend.
AC because they're still around and I'm still doing stuff for them.
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Sunday 22nd February 2015 12:52 GMT Terry 6
Re: I had a company credit card too
No, the issue is that no bean counter expects to get fired for being too cautious, but they do know that if they let something through that shouldn't, however small, a bigger bean counter will be on their tail. S/he in turn knows that there are even bigger bean counters waiting for them to slip up, who know that there are............
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Monday 23rd February 2015 00:09 GMT Cpt Blue Bear
Re: I had a company credit card too
"My most blatant one was a receipt from Asda for a dozen Durex ribbed condoms, which I insisted were PPE.
Questions were asked, but they couldn't argue with my logic..."
The Girlfriend once filed her boss's "entertaining" expense claim under "laptop servicing". Questions were indeed asked, referred to her boss, grudgingly paid and he was told not to bloody try on it again.
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Friday 20th February 2015 17:53 GMT sisk
And THAT, boys and girls, is why the technology department should be involved in the purchase of any mission critical computerized system.
I still smugly mutter "told you so" under my breath every time our HR people complain about the horrendously expensive system they chose to replace our aging in-house system for taking employment applications. Oh, and they did this without bothering to tell the in-house programmer that they'd tasked with creating a new one and giving me just enough time to get midway into the project. Wanna get permanently on my list? That's one real quick way.
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Friday 20th February 2015 19:13 GMT Alan Sharkey
Opex vs Capex
Ah, well I remember that when I had a computer budget, We had a limit on Capex, but not on Opex. Computers were Capex but accessories were not. So we used to buy diskless and memoryless PCs (we could get more of them that way) and buy the disks and memory to go in them off the Opex (limitless) budget. Everyone was happy apart from the beancounters
Those were the days.....
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Friday 20th February 2015 21:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
well 'business logic"
For a long time it was impossible using our (ex)companies travel system to book a hire car to the airport in the uk and then a hire car in the US for the business trip. Cos they were on the sane day and who would want two hire cars o the same day. Much wrangling and personal cc use was required.
And yes you useless tossers at HP this was the least of your screwups