First Impressions Of The New Place...

Now, there was me thinking a financial services company, regulated, watchdogged, and continually scared of being fined for Enron-esque malpractice, would be .... well, organised. Efficient. Results-focused. etc etc.

Wrong!

Case in point #1. Email client = Lotus Notes. Now, I used this 10-12 years ago, before Outlook really took off, and I hated Lotus then. It's not changed since. Nor has my opinion of it. It sucks, big time. I wanted to forward a calendar invite to someone else today. No can do. I want to refresh - hit F5. Nothing happens. Have to use F9. It's slow. It doesn't recognise NT logins. When I type in my notes-specific password, it shows four Xs for each digit I type. Why? Why wouldn't 1 X do, like every other application. Even random numbers of Xs might be more secure. But four? I still know how many digits is in someone's password, as I can actually divide by 4, and I'm normally pretty accurate.

Case in point #2: NT Logins. My username is a handy 8 digit alphanumeric code. No chance of me ever remembering it. And when I look in a server share to open a doc, I can see it's being read by someone, but if I want to prod that person to see if they've finished reading it, I've got to work out who user "XY4058390" is, rather than seeing something like "fbloggs".

Case in point #3: New project kicking off. I wanted to see the business case docs to give me a feel for the high level objectives. No one knew where to find it. "It's on a share somewhere". Gee. Thanks. That'll be one of the 20-odd shares that I can see when you open My Computer then.

Case in point #4: Same new project. We met the project manager. He wanted to mail us the business case. (Which isn't called a business case, obviuosly). Er. No can do. The 30-40 pages plus a couple of screenshots is too big to go through mail. But you can attach it to a meeting invite and send it. Or alternatively speak to the local IT manager to put it onto a USB data thingy, which are explicitly banned in the company.

Case in point #5: Adobe PDF Reader (or alternative) wasn't installed as standard. So when I searched the corporate intranet for email signature standards (of which there is one, but hardly ANYONE uses it), I couldn't read the nice PDF they had on it. Nor just about anything else, as it pretty much everything gets dumped to PDF if it's an official doc.

Case in point #6: I submitted a helpdesk ticket to get said reader installed. Got a response to say it was. Er. No it wasn't. Did somebody forget to actually check the install worked?

Case in point #7: I went to check the helpdesk status. I did get a nice status line, but given I had about 4 tickets open at that point, it would have been nice for the status update page to give some details of which ticket I was looking at. But no, I have to guess.

Case in point #8: It's really, really quiet. I'm too frighted to have a little fart in case it's too loud. Not like sat either next to the call center guys, or next to the goods in/goods out people one the right, with happy-clappy-sing-out-loud chap behind.

Case in point #9: Everything - and I mean everything is tied down. I go to double-click the windows clock to get a quick calendar. No can do - denied so I can't change the system time. No internet access unless requested....

Case in point #10: Internet access password is NOT your NT password. Nor your notes password. It's something else entirely.


Still, despite the fact that I went into the interview saying "Look, guys, I am an analyst, but it's nothing formal, no standard approach, just powerpoint, excel and visio" (Yes, visio is installed, even though Adobe Reader wasn't....)... so, despite saying all that, I should be able to kick ass....

... as long as they get Outlook real bloody soon.

(Seriously, the job will be alright, it's just the IT infrastructure that'll be a continual PITA).

Labels: work

posted by Blakey UK @ 9:51 pm