This Business and Moment...

Soldato
Joined
20 Feb 2004
Posts
21,202
Location
Hondon de las Nieves, Spain
Working from home is funny.

My wife inherited some Audit Spreadsheets that were absolutely useless, some of the formula were using old LotusSuite syntax, and things didn't do what they were supposed to be doing.

I fix it for her and made it a bit more simple and she's just on a skype call going through it and keeps saying "i've changed this", "i've added this" and getting loads of complements. Although she's worried people will start going to her for Excel advice!
 
Man of Honour
Joined
20 Sep 2006
Posts
33,887
Working from home is funny.

My wife inherited some Audit Spreadsheets that were absolutely useless, some of the formula were using old LotusSuite syntax, and things didn't do what they were supposed to be doing.

I fix it for her and made it a bit more simple and she's just on a skype call going through it and keeps saying "i've changed this", "i've added this" and getting loads of complements. Although she's worried people will start going to her for Excel advice!
Some of the documents that companies and small businesses use are laughable. I've used numerous agencies over the years as a contractor and I've always got highly frustrated by the stupid forms.

My mrs is having a Skype call (was F2F but online now due to the obvious) with a dietitian and she had to fill in a questionnaire. It was saved in Word 97 format which was originally designed for printing and filling out by hand, but it's all done electronically now. It was horrendous and it was probably the worst I've seen. I spent 20 minutes converting it into an editable PDF and sent it to the dietitian and she's so over the moon she offered further discount on my mrs' consultation.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
11 Sep 2009
Posts
13,911
Location
France, Alsace
Hahaha I've had this, wife took on a job of someone else with this horrible and useless excel that had been changed by so many people it just didn't work as they'd each changed different things and added stuff it made no sense. I changed it with her and sold it as her own work. :p
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
11 Sep 2009
Posts
13,911
Location
France, Alsace
Cheezus updated again to stop the plugin error so all good now. Bonus. I've been busy training the model on certain cheeses as well.


Fun while I am overloaded with work in the day. Really pleased with the machine learning though, it's great to see it working. Albeit with cheeses I've trained it on, but it'll get there with use and more pics!


Actually have a sore throat a bit of a cough so no doubt that's me done for! My worry is, who will take over my world domination?

 
Man of Honour
Joined
29 Jun 2004
Posts
21,490
Location
Oxfordshire
Got told my contract will be extended yesterday, which is a huge relief in the current climate,

Was dreading looking for a new contract while the lockdown is in place
 
Commissario
Joined
23 Nov 2004
Posts
41,851
Location
Herts
Got told my contract will be extended yesterday, which is a huge relief in the current climate,

Was dreading looking for a new contract while the lockdown is in place
We're in a right old mess, mine ended on 31st March, got given a 3 day extension until last Friday and currently working against a "letter of authority" meaning I can work until tomorrow - by which time we're expecting contracts to come through!
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
11 Sep 2009
Posts
13,911
Location
France, Alsace
Got told my contract will be extended yesterday, which is a huge relief in the current climate,

Was dreading looking for a new contract while the lockdown is in place

I have until the end of the year but we're in a huge reorg and so I keep thinking each 1:1 I'm going to get my notice. Good job on the extension! Always a huge relief, especially as you say at this time.

I'm about to kick off the development on the VolAir app work. I have a plan and sticking to it. I think people will be climbing the walls to get away once this is all over, so want to capitalise on that.
Cheezus all good. Have about 500 users at the moment. Will do more and push more when people can get out a bit and eat more cheese :D
 
Associate
Joined
2 Jan 2012
Posts
683
My company is lucky to be completely unaffected and we all work from home anyway. My girlfriend has been furloughed though but a lot of people in worse positions than us.
 
Soldato
Joined
8 Nov 2003
Posts
5,521
Location
Bedfordshire
Having to renovate, relocate, restructure and reorganise pretty much everything while on half staff, but also busier than we've been in a while. It's currently hell but it's been a big wakeup call for management that the systems I suggested we needed over a year ago will probably get the go-ahead once most of this is over.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
11 Sep 2009
Posts
13,911
Location
France, Alsace
My agency is serious ******* me off at the moment. I still havent been paid for last month and it's the 15th. I get we had bank holiday but I had all my scheduled DDs coming out on 15th, which has left me calling people back and forth to cover the account. **** I should not have to do and what's more, no one even mentioned it either.
 
Caporegime
Joined
29 Jan 2008
Posts
58,899
Hahaha I've had this, wife took on a job of someone else with this horrible and useless excel that had been changed by so many people it just didn't work as they'd each changed different things and added stuff it made no sense. I changed it with her and sold it as her own work. :p

Back when I was 17 I had a summer job at a brokerage firm in the back office, one of the back office women gave me a spreadsheet, it had a bunch of holdings from different portfolios and apparently the column containing some code related to each stock from one system needed to be updated with a code from another system. She had another spread sheet which just contained a list of the stocks and the old code and new code for each one...

She then then sat down 17 yr old me and showed me how she looks at column B, looks at the stock code then scrolls down the other spreadsheet to look up the new code then manually copies and pastes it into the spread sheet... and so on. She got me to try it in front of her too just to make sure I was following... tricky stuff eh? :D

Of course this is rather easily automated... just loop through and find and replace on each one, all the portfolios updated with new stock codes and boom... job done.

I'd assumed she'd be happy... apparently she'd already spent a couple of days on it and was expecting me to be occupied with it for several more days (it was a big spreadsheet with thousands of rows!) but no - she was very suspicious, she kicked off about it and claimed that each entry needed to be checked - how did I know for sure that I'd updated with the right code unless I'd checked each row manually etc... fortunately the head back office woman was happy.
 
Soldato
Joined
15 Sep 2009
Posts
2,876
Location
Manchester
Eventually confirmed to go on an NSX-T Official Course which not only will be good as we're doing more and more NSX Deployments, but will also open me up to eventually being able to do my VMware accreditation without sinking my own money in to it.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
20 Sep 2006
Posts
33,887
Yeah, which will be good, as we've been an NSX-V shop for a number of deployments now, for some reason they chose V over T even recently whereas now we're designing and deploying NSX-T solutions so they want a bunch of us to get certified.
T hasn't been as mature as V until recently to be fair, however it's now surpassed it. Who are you doing the course with?
 
Soldato
Joined
27 Dec 2005
Posts
17,281
Location
Bristol
Nothing compares to my other half. She's frontline NHS and has taken on responsibility of annual leave for her department of ~150 staff.

The current system is... notebooks. Yep, notebooks. One for each band. Each page is a week with the date written at the top and then three hand drawn columns with the person's name, how many weeks they've taken and the cumulative total. When people cancel their leave they're crossed out and the total recalculated.

No backup, obviously.

Unfortunately what I can do is limited due to NHS and IT restrictions, no macros etc, but even a simple spreadsheet replica with conditional formatting, a dashboard sheet that provides an overview, flags low capacity weeks, etc took about an hour in total.

She's filled it in and about a third of the manually calculated cumulative hours were wrong.

Staff still need to submit requests via a paper slip that then goes in her tray mind, because "that's just the way it is".
 
Soldato
Joined
20 Feb 2004
Posts
21,202
Location
Hondon de las Nieves, Spain
I honestly don't know how people work in IT support. We're setting up Oracle PBCS, and i've just spent 15 minutes with a colleague trying to talk them through clicking a link and setting up a password, whilst my wife laughs in the background.

No way could i deal with morons all day long.
 
Back
Top Bottom