We had so much free time...

For the past five years or so, maybe more, the company has been using a home-made-to-order system for various things, both administrative and non. I knew of it, but we didn't use it at our department.

A few months ago we were informed all purchasing requisitions would need to be made through it. BTW, let's call it BLUESCREEN (you'll see why). We'd hoped to get someone to teach us to use it. the company instead arranged interactive video chats for the purpose. Well, I did understand what to do, more or less, and I was sure with the manual and actual experience I could do it.

Ah, but then the system has various mandatory fields not marked as mandatory. So when you skip one, the whole process collapses near the end, or you get stuck without knowing why. Better yet, the values for various fields can be looked up, but some are completely blank. Say you want to input a department and you get a look up list like:

017 SALES
018 ACCOUNTING

etc.

Next you run a cross a field labeled "Authorization," and get a blank look-up list. So you assume the field isn't mandatory, right? Well, it is, but it doesn't say so. Instead the process gets stuck alter on.

So what do you do? You beg IT, then you beg Accounting, then you threaten to go to the owners and explain we're about to lose a major contract because it's company policy not to give personalized assistance, then you get actual help. And then you learn "you are supposed to ask IT to enable access to your department's lists."

Say what? The use of BLUESCREEN is mandatory, but it's not enabled when it's set up? Why does IT think I asked it be set up? because I had so much free time at work??

Anyway, later we were told all reimbursements would have to go through BLUESCREEN as well. Ok, fine, I already got past the magic password hurdle.

Wrong.

See, we have to enter each item being reimbursed into the accounting part of the system.

And here's the real nightmare. Aside from unlabeled mandatory fields and unclear directions, you get "useful" features like SHIFT-F8-DEL to go back one field, or ALT-CTRL-TAB to look up a value, and so on. Sometimes TAB acts as ENTER, others as TAB. Some controls can be worked with the keyboard, but others only with the mouse, and none are labeled or obvious in any way.

But here's the kicker.

Commercial invoices in Mexico are issued with an XML file. This file contains all the info on a particular invoice, from client, amount, items, tax, payment form, etc. So you'd think, well, just upload the file in the system and be done, right?

Wrong.

First you enter the supplier, date, amount, tax and payment form, then you upload the file. If you erred in a value, the system send you back with a warning that "DATES DON'T MATCH."

It's so laborious, besides, that I now have to go in every weekend to fill out the reimbursement forms.

To top it off, while the system is company-owned, it relies on some network/cloud/something server with a per-user fee. So guess who the lucky girl is in the department who has sole access to it?

I did have the satisfaction of, accidentally, commenting to one of the developers "If we paid more than 3 cents for this piece of junk, we got robbed." >:)

I swear it was an accident. I didn't know he'd been on the developing team.