First of all, I am generally out of sorts today because I am doing a
really fucking annoying task I've been putting off for weeks. This delicious turdburger ended up on my plate because, before I took over the student helldesk, I was sort of at loose ends for justifying my existence in my poorly-defined role and so this got chucked at me. It does not require wit or organization or anything except a boundless tolerance for suffering fools (in this case, the College's fucking retarded procedures that would make 1972 blush for shame, but also the bovine indifference of a number of managers who should be more engaged in their reports) gladly.
I do not have this.
Task: Figure out which of our 80-odd hourly employees have vacation time, and how much; and email their managers to say "Fred Bloggs has 42.50 vacation hours accumulated; please make sure he takes it."
Ur-Stupidity: That most of the managers/supervisors in our department don't keep on top of this themselves. They should be able to pull it from the dept.'s time tracking system...though since many of them don't actually ensure the students are using it as they should, the data isn't 100% correct, and then they bitch that it's useless. ANYways.
Stupidity #1: The hourly people can't use their vac time until they've worked 500 hours in the current fiscal year. But, they HAVE to use it all before the
end of the fiscal year. This means that, somewhere around, um, now, everyone's time suddenly becomes available.
Stupidity #2: The payroll spreadsheets, from whence we pull this data, are available only with four weeks' lag time. So I'm looking at the state of affairs from Feb. 11th. So some of these students who don't show as having any time available probably do by now--but I don't know for sure.
Stupidity #3: The payroll spreadsheets are printouts--we do not and cannot get them in an electronic format--from some program that's older than I am. There's one for each budget line. The budget lines in no wise line up with who reports to whom. E.g., Lab Guy has a bunch of people paid out of Tech Fee, and some off his own budget line. The "Support Services" budget line has some of my minions, some of
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spride's, the Notworks Guys' dogsbody, and some random fellow from the training center.
Stupidity #3a: ...and we
moved a whole bunch of people to different budget lines this year, so my sense of where to find people is off....
Stupidity #3b: ...but due to the absolute fucking retardation of the payroll system, the moved people
appear on both budget spreadsheets. But not with current data. The former budget line has them snapshotted as the last time they were paid out of that budget. With no obvious flagging. So if I forget that Fred Bloggs was someone who was moved, I just go "oh he hasn't made 500 hours yet, nothing to report".
Stupidity #4: For each spreadsheet, are the employees listed in order of last name? No. Seniority? No. They are sorted by
Social Security Number. But not the whole one, because we don't want to include those for security reasons; all but the last four digits are chopped off. But it's sorted by the
whole number. Basically, there is no way to do this that doesn't involve flipping back and forth and up and down and missing stuff and uleauleauleauleaulea
Stupidity #5: Did I mention that the column headings are only on the first page of each spreadsheet? And that there are ten columns of numbers that represent hours, all next to each other?
So I have to spend a day doing this, and I'll have to do it several more times as we get near the end of the fiscal year, because heaven forfend people should remember things more than a week old, or increment on their own; and it makes me cranky enough. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE
My henchperson calls up from the front desk. "...Can you give students (graduated students, that is) permission to look at their unofficial transcripts?"
Your humble correspondent: "Um no."
[This requires a bit of explanation. There is the Official Transcript, on paper, which one must get from the registrar for, I think, a nominal sum; takes several days or more to acquire; then there is the "Unofficial Transcript", which you can see in eSIMS, the registration program--but you can't log into eSIMS if you aren't a current student.]
Henchperson: "I didn't think so, but I have a student on the phone who I'd just transferred to the Registrar and they told him you specifically could do that and transferred him back."
YHC: *unprintable*
Henchperson, bless her, went on a telephonic voyage of discovery to learn that the Registrar Herself, not just her front-line minions (who run the gamut from "pretty okay" to "how do you tie your fucking shoes in the morning, you idiot") seems to be of the opinion that I, me personally, can greenscreen[1] graduated students back into the Portal so they can log into eSIMS so they can see their stuff. I do not know what gave her this impression, since several months ago there was an extended discussion on this
exact topic, because alumni needing transcripts are a common problem, and $FORMER_OFFICEMATE (who
can greenscreen people into the Portal, which I cannot) explained at that time to all and sundry that it is a Really Damn Bad Idea to greenscreen former students in as current students because very unusual and unwanted things can happen as a result. I swear to God, the institutional memory down there lasts about three months, and then they flush the buffers entirely, permitting all sorts of new flavors of Wrong to flourish. So now we have to go down and explain it
again.
[1] magically put people in by hand, bypassing the usual data feeding process. Usually done for adjunct faculty because their lame-ass departments haven't actually done the hiring paperwork by the start of classes.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandroot
