serinde

Student email, quoted verbatim:

Hi,

I have a question about online registration. I created a a portal login ID and password, and then tried to register for a Summer 1 class through the eSims site. But it won't let me register. When I mouse over "Registration" on the nav bar on the left, it won't let me click on, and gives me a little box that says something like "appointment April 15 9 am".

Can you explain what this means, and what I should do?


Now this is totally out there, I realize, but how about trying to register on April 15 at 9am?

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 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.

I have not moved off the Help Desk from 9am until after 6:30pm this week. I mean, not for lunch, not for nothing. We are shorthanded and we are flooded. Because why? Two reasons, chiefly:

1) Damn near all of the incoming students for this semester are in the Hunter systems, but have never been picked up by CUNY. For weeks. This means that none of them can register, as we just learned, since they are all trying to register and having (not unreasonable) hysterics when they can't. And there is nothing we can do about it.

2) Those students who DID make it into the Portal, through luck or timing or God-knows-what, CUNY's wonderful tangle of Java is not giving them the little module bit that has the link to eSIMS, the registration application. Each one of which must be dealt with by looking up the account and opening a trouble ticket at the Mothership. A separate one. Because heaven forfend they should say "gosharoonie, there's hundreds of people with this problem! Maybe we should make one all-around fix!" There is a work-around, but it's difficult to explain, especially to hysterical non-computer-literates.

And then there's the usual registration drama, which is never less than glorious. And one of my staff is away for two weeks, and one suddenly got accepted to nursing school, and we don't have enough for full coverage on hours let alone take care of the extra load (which is why I'm working the desk, and I drafted Hacker-Boy to do the same...and we're STILL not keeping up), and Facilities bitched up our moving date by the day before saying "oh er um there won't be phones there til next week sometime", and I don't have time to pull back or do anything but fight fires. And shout at people internally who Don't Get It. It doesn't help.

I am on the world's most dire conference call, which is for all CUNY Help Desk managers (and the woman at the Mothership who fills that role). We are a half-hour in and so far it's been all about the incoming Oracle PeopleSoft bleargh. Not a word about how students couldn't register for six hours on Monday. But I don't care, because I am wearing new clothes and have borrowed nedlnthred's awesome teal shoes. I feel like I can throw down with anything.

OH WE JUST GOT TO THE PORTAL ISSUE. "It's not down! People could still get to Blackboard! It was only LDAP!" (WHICH YOU NEED TO REGISTER WITH.) Oy veh es mir. "We see usage spikes and that is what causes the problem, we don't know what's causing that and are looking into it." Gosh, d'you think that maybe, possibly, they could be coincident with registration sessions?

I am sitting on the floor (next to a power jack) at the side of a corridor which, until about 3 minutes ago, had been very empty and tranquil; now there is a positive river of people flowing through it. I perceive something just let out. (Also the exhibit hall is now opening.)

Not a lot scheduled in for today, panel-wise. There's one this afternoon which I am interested in which is on training help desk personnel, but not much else is relevant to my interests. Might stop by one in about 45 min. on supporting iPhones on campus, though I think we're going to stop with "here are your mail settings and here's where you put them" in any case.

My go-get-ness and drive are also being weighed down by how moopy I'm feeling today. This may be hormones, I don't know (my body is having its usual stellar timing). Or whether the following *urk* moment and its reverberations in my psyche is a cause or an effect of the moopy--

I ran into someone from Hunter who I didn't know was here, and we chatted for a moment, and:
Her: How long are you staying?
Me: Til Monday actually, I'm taking a little vacation
Her: Oh that's great! Is your husband joining you?
Me: ....no.

So I am trying to summon a little excitement, enthusiasm, and drive, when what I really want to do is curl up in a quiet dark place. Perhaps I should have made time for a ten-minute vinyasa this morning, as I did the last two days.

(Bonus points are awarded for STR'ing the subject line. Without Teh Googles, I mean.)

I suddenly realized I leave for this conference in seven short days. WHAT

On the bright side, I can get all my planning and organization for it done at work, and it's not slacking, because it's for work. Yes. Fear my rationalization powers.

Unlike the other computers around the college, the machines dedicated to use in the larger lecture halls are (in theory) maintained by the AV people, not by the usual technicians. So therefore it's much harder for me to go and smack a bitch when I come back from a new student orientation and find that the lecture hall has attempted to pass my flash card a virus, as happens about 50% of the time. Or when, as happened today, the fucking equipment wasn't working at all.

"Hello, freshmen! I'm from the IT department and I'm here to tell you about all the wonderful services we provide with consummate professionalism! OH EXCEPT THE SHIT IN THIS ROOM WHICH IS BROKEN"

I really hate being made to look stupid. I desire to find someone to express my displeasure to, with a very large stick.

As expected, for summer hours I have two train choices: "too early" and "too late". The 6:31 train got me here at 7:40, and it would have been slightly earlier except that I had to wait an unusually long time for the F. (The next train, 6:56, generated an arrival time of ~8:13.) I am also deeply offended that I have to be leaving the house earlier than I had been accustomed to getting up. I didn't much mind getting up stupid early for exercise purposes, but this is weaksauce.

The 6:31 train was mobbed. WHAT THE FUCK, AMERICA. It is to be noted that the connector was much less so, and you coulda fired a cannon through the subway car I was on; thus I can extrapolate that most of that mob was going to Wall St. and/or Exchange Place. Well, and there you have it. But one of the few crumbs of consolation I was expecting out of this was a nice empty train for 20 minutes, and I find this is Not Mine.

...left in my voicemail today, transcribed verbatim:

"Hi Victoria it's me, XXXXX, from Payroll. Uh, it is the change of rate for Smith John is fine, so if he needs to multiply hours times 9.85 that is the rate as he is supposed to get, is fine. But if you want call me back, please 19999. All right? Bye bye."

(Generated by me asking about the fact that John Smith, who had had a pay increase back in March to $9.85/hr, had not seen said increase & back pay reflected in his paychecks.)