Today is the anniversary of my 11th year of employment at work. Eleven years, wow. So today to celebrate my existance, I started cleaning my desk. I’t about 1/4 of the way done now and I can actually see the plastic fake wood grain top in places. Prior to today it had reached a point of critical mass were I’m pretty sure it was beginning to implode. I know I felt a shift in gravity. So really, me cleaning my ddesk can be constituted as one of the signs of the apocalypse.
No really, seriously it is!
It’s right up there with RFID tags, and those equestrian guys.
Day: March 23, 2006
I feel pretty oh so pretty…
Months ago, our H.R. department at work switched from an old computer system, to a new more modern system. Rather than have someone write a program to dump the data from the old system into the new one, they opted to rekey all of the data by hand. I cannot emphasize enough how pissed off this made me when I heard it. NEVER REKEY DATA!!! NEVER!!! I forget the actuall percentages, but I know it introduces a HUGE percentage of While looking through my record on the library system a month ago I noticed something odd. My sex was listed as female. Assuming this was just one of our staff screwing around, or me having used it to test something I switched it back and ignored it. (I regularly use my record as a test record, afterall who better than me to know if my data is correct) Last night I happend to look at my record again and I was again listed as femail. I know for a fact I hadn’t changed my record since the last time I corrected it. So I got to looking at the data in the HR system, and to my surprise and fustration I was listed as female.
I called up H.R. and when they asked “How are you today?” I responded, “I’m feeling rather emasculated actually.” That got a conscerend response, then I explained the problem and was reassured with a “Oh, you too huh!” The staffmember then went in and corrected the typo, while explaining to me that I wasn’t the first person to have this problem since the system switch.
Once the record was corrected we joked about it a bit more. I told her “Wow, I suddenly have the urge to go drink beer, play baseball, and scratch myself.”
It just really bothers me that in a situation where we are responsible for all of this personal data, we can’t be a little more intellient as to how we handle things.
In my book, There is never an excuse to rekey data when moving from one system to another. I don’t have a problem with one or two easily verifiable records, but to re-key ALL employment records!!! Get real! How many other less frivilous errors are now in the system? Perhaps this staff memeber is no longer having money paid into thier retirement account. Perhaps that employee is now listed as faculty instead of staff. How will we know? We wont really untill someone else happens to notice a problem…
John's Musings 