[Rant, Long.] Bureaucracy can go suck a fucking fat one.
Do thing for work. Send off spreadsheet of what we've done. End of. This is how things used to work, and that would be it.
Now, we've recently shifted some of our business to someone else, which comes with a different 'process'. While I understand that there is no 2 business' do the same thing in exactly the same way, I am beginning to feel like I might strangle someone. Though, I'm starting to doubt that most of the people I'm emailing and phoning are even people at all and this is all some sort of elaborate joke.
Our new 'process', provided with a highly convoluted flow chart (seriously who makes these fucking things anyway) by a numbercruncher was completely wrong. It left off some seriously vital steps to, presumably, hide how much of a fuck about our new 'partner' is. These guys seem to be doing nothing apart from outsourcing all the bits that I/we thought they did, and passing the work back onto everyone else, including us.
Now, when I do something, I have to send something off to one person with details of it. I also have to send a copy of this to someone else, but this is largely what we had to do before we switched with some minor additions that I had to suggest because their template was fucking clownshoes. But, whatever. Fine. I fixed that. Hey, you could even say that, despite the horrendous business-ness of it, I helped to streamline the process. Which makes me cringe just writing it. It doubles the work, but it's relatively straightforward.
Anyway, so these days I have to send not one thing off, but two. That's ok. I was able to deal with this on Monday, though it makes things a little longer. However, it would appear that this is not actually the case. Yesterday, I was told that it's actually vital that a third party receives some of the information in a slightly different way, to someone else, and they need a scanned copy of it so they got a signature with each thing. This, too, is kind of ok, but sadly has to be done individually, for each thing, into a propitiatory web portal. So as opposed to one spreadsheet, we now have a second spreadsheet, a paper form that has to be filled in with a unique reference number followed by scanning it, uploading it. Alright. Getting a bit long guys. We're now on triple figures.
Fast forward to today. Quarter passed 4 in the afternoon, and I get a phone call from one of the parties saying that a 4th piece of information will now have to be provided with each thing that I do. So we're now at 2 spreadsheets and a handwritten one page form that has to be scanned and uploaded. Why an email won't do is beyond me but whatever.
If you'll believe it, we now also add in a fax to this. For each and every thing. Now, this form is like nothing that I have ever seen before, it's complicated, long and had to be populated with shit I have no idea about and haven't ever seen before. Not my department, nor anyone else's in our firm. That's a bit of snag. So I call the party back and ask them what's that about. They, despite having been the person to forward it on, and having other people who also use them don't know anything about this form, nor how to fill it out, just that it is vital. So - how do we fill it in guys?
Dunno. Call this person.
So I do. Surprise, he doesn't have a fucking clue, so he puts me through to someone else, who is on holiday. One can only assume that he is the form-master, some sort of dingy drippy basement dwelling form-nerd who likes nothing better than creating drop-down menus full of symbols and acronyms that know one has a fucking clue about and bizarre little bits of knowledge that he uses to fluff out his fact-throne where he strokes an evil looking snake to sleep in the evenings and then slinks off into a dusty pile of yellowed bits of scrap paper to recuperate. Anyway, we're left with someone who's presumably dusting off some sort of old cryptic tome that was shielded from the light of day behind a filing cabinet protected by guard-scorpions and witches. In all honesty, I think this guy is probably just there hoping things auto-upload into their system and praying nothing goes wrong or he'll kill himself into his keyboard by stapling his face to death.
I digress. I'm not wishing that on Stuart. Or Steve. Him. The minor-form-nerd understudy.
Anyway, the point is, this now completely new, mysterious and seemingly extraneous form has appeared, and everyone is insisting that it needs filling out but no one has a clue about how to populate it. It's long, complicated, and we're all fucking baffled. The kicker of course is that everyone is insisting that all of these things should have been done on Monday, and the cut off (remember time of phone call was 4.15pm) is, wait for it: 5 this evening.
Now, this might be doable, if it wasn't for the fact that it wasn't just one thing we did. It was 15. So, I diligently sent off the first spreadsheet, and the second, an the form that has to be scanned and the uploaded. 15 times. Now, I have a baffling form in front of me, know one knows what's actually supposed to go into any of the rows, coloumns, drop-downs and I'm waiting on
a)instructions on how to fill it in
b)who to actually send it to
c)where to get the information that needs to go into the form from in the first place (probably from a 5th party which have gone home or fuck knows)
d)my life to end by multiple staples to the face
At point of writing, it's 5.12pm. Yup, that's 12 minutes after deadline. Not really on. So, once I get my instructions through, I shall be filling out these forms, one at a time, for each thing, 15 times. By hand.
And then I will be faxing them. Individually. If I get a fax number to send them to. And screaming in rage at our medieval piece of shit papershredder of a cunty fax machine.
What riles me about this, is I was sold this idea of a switch on ease. Everything was supposed to have been easier, quicker, more efficient.
Instead, I have 4 times the amount of work, 3 times the amount of people I have to report shit to and no idea how to do half of it because know one else knows either and can't tell me.
Oh, I forget to mention, this is only the beginning. We've only moved one bit of our business across, and will be doing it for the rest of it too. Which is going to quadruple my workload for absolutely nothing apart from everyone else's need to boxtick.
I'm fucking livid.
tldr fuck forms and everyone's a liar and this is the worst day ever and I'm going to be here til midnight next Monday probably
^^^^cunts
Posted Aug 12, 2015, 4:24 PM UTC · edited