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Call of CUNY-CIS: 1d10 SAN loss
Apr. 9th, 2009 01:52 pmSeveral weeks ago, when I was ranting about some irreconcilably-differing data I had gotten from the Mothership's HR division, $BOSS told me: "Don't try to understand what's going on over there. If you ever finally manage to understand all of it, you'll go completely insane."
This is a perfect analogy and I need to print it out and tack it above my desk.
Comes now a student, who I shall call Sally Smith. Sally's problem is that, in Blackboard (the course management system), she keeps showing up as "Sam". This information being fed from CUNY's LDAP, we look there, and sho' nuff, they have her as "Sam Smith". This means that some college database, somewhere, is telling them that she's Sam. Now, the only one of these I can check is the student database, and it knows she's Sally, so that's not it. So we open a trouble ticket with the Mothership's help desk. In due course, they respond, informing us that it's our employee database feeding the bad info. OK; we send Sally off to bug HR.
But, I ponder more deeply, why does her LDAP record not show that she has a staff affiliation at Hunter? That's supposed to be automagic. If $PERSON is in the employee database, the next pull gives them staff affiliation in the LDAP. And if her info isn't being pulled, how can that be the source of her involuntary gender change? I reply to the Mothership, I ask this question. Oh, Theron Marks, where are your children now?
Quotha: "She does have a staff affiliation. When you look at the Campus LDAP, the role & the campuses doesn't necessarily line up."
So, look at that image again. She has N student affiliations and one staff affiliation. And what they tell us, what the official answer is, and I confirmed this with $FORMER_OFFICEMATE who has to deal with them all the time, "you worthless gits at the college have no way of knowing which college that single Staff affilliation really goes with".
I should mention that EVERYTHING a person can do is linked to their college/role affiliations. So if something is fucked up, if a person can't register or can't log into course management or a million other things, we can't actually tell what the problem is, because they give us garbage reporting. The actual data may be right, or it might not; we can't tell. Effectively, they have fingerpainted a picture on canvas, tacked it to a cardboard box, and said "Here's your TV, now shut the fuck up". I don't know why they think that giving eighteen support desks a tool that they know gives bogus information is in any wise helpful. BRAIN EXPLODE NOW
Lest you think this unusual, I present you with $FORMER_OFFICEMATE's record. He is not twice a student at CCNY; he's a student there, a student here, and staff here. And we know the actual directory entry is correct, because he can register for classes; but if he came up with a registration problem, we would take one look and say "well, you aren't listed as a student with Hunter, you need to double-check with Admissions to see that you're actually admitted this semester", thus wasting scads of time and making him run around to places that cannot help him, because he's actually correct everywhere.
This is what they give us to work with. And they wonder why we want as little to do with them as possible, and jeer loudly at their insistence that they should run campus email.
This is a perfect analogy and I need to print it out and tack it above my desk.
Comes now a student, who I shall call Sally Smith. Sally's problem is that, in Blackboard (the course management system), she keeps showing up as "Sam". This information being fed from CUNY's LDAP, we look there, and sho' nuff, they have her as "Sam Smith". This means that some college database, somewhere, is telling them that she's Sam. Now, the only one of these I can check is the student database, and it knows she's Sally, so that's not it. So we open a trouble ticket with the Mothership's help desk. In due course, they respond, informing us that it's our employee database feeding the bad info. OK; we send Sally off to bug HR.
But, I ponder more deeply, why does her LDAP record not show that she has a staff affiliation at Hunter? That's supposed to be automagic. If $PERSON is in the employee database, the next pull gives them staff affiliation in the LDAP. And if her info isn't being pulled, how can that be the source of her involuntary gender change? I reply to the Mothership, I ask this question. Oh, Theron Marks, where are your children now?
Quotha: "She does have a staff affiliation. When you look at the Campus LDAP, the role & the campuses doesn't necessarily line up."
So, look at that image again. She has N student affiliations and one staff affiliation. And what they tell us, what the official answer is, and I confirmed this with $FORMER_OFFICEMATE who has to deal with them all the time, "you worthless gits at the college have no way of knowing which college that single Staff affilliation really goes with".
I should mention that EVERYTHING a person can do is linked to their college/role affiliations. So if something is fucked up, if a person can't register or can't log into course management or a million other things, we can't actually tell what the problem is, because they give us garbage reporting. The actual data may be right, or it might not; we can't tell. Effectively, they have fingerpainted a picture on canvas, tacked it to a cardboard box, and said "Here's your TV, now shut the fuck up". I don't know why they think that giving eighteen support desks a tool that they know gives bogus information is in any wise helpful. BRAIN EXPLODE NOW
Lest you think this unusual, I present you with $FORMER_OFFICEMATE's record. He is not twice a student at CCNY; he's a student there, a student here, and staff here. And we know the actual directory entry is correct, because he can register for classes; but if he came up with a registration problem, we would take one look and say "well, you aren't listed as a student with Hunter, you need to double-check with Admissions to see that you're actually admitted this semester", thus wasting scads of time and making him run around to places that cannot help him, because he's actually correct everywhere.
This is what they give us to work with. And they wonder why we want as little to do with them as possible, and jeer loudly at their insistence that they should run campus email.
