End user doing a lot more work to avoid a little bit of work

Posted by Geno0wl@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 43 comments

Every day the office manager is supposed to finalize the shift and then export that to Excel and drop it into a shared folder for the Dispatch team to reference(Dispatch doesn't have direct access to our database due to domain design choices years ago).

As part of that finalization step the office manager is supposed to mark what vehicles, if any, were assigned to each person. So if any issues arise, like a ticket from a speed camera, we know who was supposed to be driving that car on that day.

It is also notable that the availability export to an excel sheet is locked with a password so it can not be edited. You have to put the vehicle number into the scheduling software to have it properly show up on the sheet. Or so we thought.

We had a supervisor call trying to find out which car was driven on a particular day. Went into the system and pulled the report for their location, and all of the vehicle fields were blank, not only for that day but every day. Which didn't make sense, as Dispatch needs those car numbers and would have complained if they didn't have those.

Tried figuring out what was wrong and why it wasn't saving, because that surely must be the issue, but it was a fruitless endeavor. So I looked at the folder snapshots from the day before and noticed something...that Location's schedule export was a PDF file, not an Excel sheet like every other file. When I opened the file I saw that the vehicle numbers were handwritten.

The office manager was printing off the sheet(which is frequently multiple pages), hand writing in the assigned vehicles, then scanning that back to her e-mail, before dropping that into the file share.

When we asked her why she was doing that exactly, she said "I can just write faster than I can type".

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androshalforc1@reddit

I could understand i need to be over with the driver’s and vehicle to assign them, able the computer to input them is on the other side of the building.

But writing is faster then typing ? Just put a list of all the drivers names in and it will autofill as soon as you have enough of their name filled out.

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TinyNiceWolf@reddit

OK, time to type "J". That's not a J, that's a Q. That's not a J, that's a W. That's not a J, that's an E....

Yup, definitely slower than writing, for those who hunt and peck, and find the keyboard layout a complete surprise every time.

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ElfjeTinkerBell@reddit

for those who hunt and peck, and find the keyboard layout a complete surprise every time.

I find for these kinds of issues, it sometimes helps to agree with them and complain about someone who designed a keyboard that is completely illogical and we're stuck with it. Either they can tell you that the logic comes from typewriters and they feel smart, or you found a common ground to complain about something, even though you both know it's not going to change.

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alf666@reddit

At that point it should be justifiable to fire someone for not having the required skills to perform their job duties on the company's standard-issue equipment.

If a disability-related accommodation is needed, then they can request a different keyboard.

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androshalforc1@reddit

That’s why we have the ability to learn. This person has the ability to practice every day even if it’s just writing out everyone’s name once a day they will get better.

ItsGotToMakeSense@reddit

Once had a helpdesk tech taking suspiciously long to close tickets. Every day or two there was a time entry saying "called, left voicemail" but nothing seemed to be getting done. Boss pulled call logs, found the tech was lying. He'd never made a single call. Wrote him up, gave him another chance, warned him not to do that again. What do you think happened next?

Same pattern. "Called, left voicemail" every day or two on most of his waiting tickets. Call logs showed he was making calls now, and staying on for about a minute or so, but still it seemed suspicious that he never got through. So we listened to a call. It was 90 seconds of the menu looping.

This fucking guy. He was going to the trouble of pretending to call, multiple times per week, to get out of having to actually call the user. (This obviously did lead to his departure)

henke37@reddit

Remedial training time! This time typewriter training.

gCKOgQpAk4hz@reddit

You may need realize that current post high school generation doesn't have computer typing skills. They have mobile computing platform tapping skills.

Our new hire: * Works with only one window in a 50 inch screen, * Types Title Case by pressing the caps lock before and after the capitalized letter,

Please don't get me started about modifier keys like, Alt, Cmd, Cntrl or double modifier like Cntl-Alt-Del.

dutchah@reddit

Types Title Case by pressing the caps lock before and after the capitalized letter

I have a colleague like that and it's maddening. It's equally bizarre seeing that his general way of typing, at 22/23, is the exact same as his manager who's twice his age.

OldGeekWeirdo@reddit

No, 10-key skills.

brash21361@reddit

Get Ezykey. Its a lock box on the wall and opened by fingerprint and has a fob which will not release until desired car is entered.

Harry_Smutter@reddit

Yeesh. Stuff like this can be automated and then spit out a report for whoever needs it. Having to manually type in who uses what is archaic.

Honest_Relation4095@reddit

At least now you can use AI to automatically retrieve those files amd put the text back into the actual excel sheets.

ZeCactus@reddit

With almost 80% correctness!

Ich_mag_Kartoffeln@reddit

It would be a lot lower rate than that if it tried to read my writing!

racedrone@reddit

OCR, not AI

syntaxerror53@reddit

AICR

DiodeInc@reddit

Technically, you could say that every LLM performs Character Recognition

wrincewind@reddit

"yep, that's Bart Simpson! I'd recognise him anywhere."

Connect-Preference@reddit

Are we talking 5 Dispatch units? or 50?

Geno0wl@reddit (OP)

Her assignment oversees 38 people. Maybe 2/3 of them will be in the field.

To note though, there is a button built into the software called "pull previous" that will take that driver's most recently used vehicle. Vehicles move around based on needs(equipment vans vs cars) but at least 70% of them use the same car day in and day.

Then she definitely needs remedial training on how to use that.

Also on the consequences of her "clever" workaround.

No idea if she actually got any real consequences. I can see her account is still active but I am not about to dig into personnel files to see if she got a reprimand or anything like that.

fresh-dork@reddit

WOW classic is a thing now. Assign her to a week of barrens chat and see if she doesn't start typing faster

Re: Consequences

I meant that she doesn't realize that her "shortcut" makes it more difficult for the people downstream. She needs to be trained on how other people use (or can't use) her work product.

Rathmun@reddit

I think she also needs to pay that speeding ticket.

dfinkelstein@reddit

Assuming you're speaking from personal experience:

Why don't you believe the user's explanation, that they write much faster than they type?

I'm lost as to why that's so hard to believe. Makes sense to me that their procedure might be much easier for them than typing the whole thing.

A lot of people type using two fingers, for example.

socal_swiftie@reddit

gonna send you a notification anyways. own up to your downvotes

okay fine I'll actually delete it. you win.

kai58@reddit

They would need to be insanely slow for printing, writing and scanning to be faster than typing.

urthen@reddit

It's not about believing the explanation, it's about the manager not doing the process right and now the information isn't easily available when required. And somehow nobody noticing, but that's a separate issue

The title suggests it is about not believing the explanation. The title suggests she's making more work for herself.

smokinbbq@reddit

It's significant amount more work. Now that there's an issue, they can't easily query the database to find out which car was where, they need to manually scour the PDFs to figure this shit out. Bad workflow from this "manager".

I don't understand why you commented. You're not the person I replied to.

You're also not responding to anything I said. You're just repeating "it's more work".

AshleyJSheridan@reddit

I think you've failed to account for the whole printing and scanning part...

no-but-wtf@reddit

It doesn’t matter that it’s faster for her. It matters that she’s not recording things the approved way, resulting in people not being able to find the information they need. Old Betsy is gonna have to learn how to type if she wants to stay employed because it’s completely absurd for her to be printing pages, writing on them. and scanning them back in.

Are you sure you’re in the right sub?

DasAllerletzte@reddit

Nah, you just described the average governmental office in Germany.

Moneia@reddit

It doesn’t matter that it’s faster for her

I'd be wondering of this is going to end up as "I'm not very good with computers *giggle*" employee.

MalwareDork@reddit

Doesn't matter if they type a million times faster, they're disrupting the pipeline from excel docs -> who's name is on the vehicle and ruined any accountability. They completely broke the system because they didn't want to adhere by the rules.

takesSubsLiterally@reddit

I think it is less about typing fast or slow and more about the surrounding work.

Let's say there are 50 cars. Instead of typing 100-150 numbers the user prints the page, walks to the printer, writes those numbers, walks back to the scanner, and uploads a pdf. Even if it takes them a full second to find every number there is no way this user can print and scan a document in less than 2 minutes but can't type.

Personally my money is on crazy long nails.

Riajnor@reddit

Wut? How much overhead is being added by printing and scanning and then saving the emails. If the act of typing is taking more time than that then you have a problem

Lellela@reddit

Used to work for a chain of grocery stores doing pricing/scan/dsd coordination. Our head produce guy would get the numbers from the distributor every week in an email, print them out, fax them to the stores, and then email the produce heads at store level to let them know to check their fax machine. I face-palmed so hard I about broke my nose. Had to explain to him how he could just forward the email and save himself so much time.

GovernmentPuzzled819@reddit

oof