So today at work I was sitting at my desk quietly writing a program when <bling> I got an IM from one of our India team members. First thing he says is, “HI THERE,” at which moment I knew this was gonna be one of those fun conversations with someone who doesn’t know what the caps lock key does. And these are the people who “fix” your computer. So I proceed to carry on a short conversation with him which turns out to be completely worthless anyway. I found out that the whole thing was a chain reaction of brain damage. The line went something like this: Stupid customer brings computer back because they can’t figure out how to register Trend Micro -> Moron agent at precinct hooks machine up to us (against policy) for the sole purpose of having us register Trend Micro because a) he’s too dumb to know what’s going on, b) he’s just not paying attention to what’s going on, c) his boss told him to do it, d) he doesn’t like Black Ops for whatever reason and wants to get back at us by wasting our time, or e) all of the above -> Idiot Accenture India guy who can’t speak English doesn’t have a clue what’s going on or what to do about it -> I take care of it in 2 minutes. That’s just a minor example of the kind of crap we deal with all the time.

So then I get this email about how the process over at Victor Company is changing. They’re now doing this thing called a “self post op” which is where a bunch of them get to check their own work. Am I the only one that thinks this is the dumbest thing ever? I mean, the purpose of a post op is to have a second set of eyes go over a machine to make sure its done right. So what’s the point of having the same person that did the actual work do the post op too? Unfortunately this kind of logic is not uncommon amongst the management at Accenture. And even worse, Accenture pretty much dictates the processes of our whole operation now. So anyway, I reply to the email and let my boss, his boss, and his boss’ boss know how I and my team feel about this whole thing. I tell them how this self post op thing defeats the purpose of a post op, and how the quality of work has gone down the toilet since we got taken over by Accenture. I remind them that even when we were doing the services we always checked each other’s work, even though our quality was much higher than Victor Company’s. So I get a reply back from the Director of Services Academy (a.k.a. the guy one step below the VP of services, a.k.a. my boss’ boss [edit: that's actually my boss' boss' boss]), and he wants numbers to support my complaint. Well, for one thing, keeping track of numbers is not part of my job, and for another thing, you can’t really measure the quality of work of fixing computers with numbers since it’s really not an exact science. So he gives me some BS numbers about our redo rate being so low and everything even though those numbers are skewed and inaccurate anyway. So, as usual, what they’re really trying to tell me is what we think doesn’t matter at all to them, and this “your opinion counts” rhetoric that they’re always telling us is really just a load of crap.

This is all obviously very frustrating, so I’m done with this rant for right now.

Tags: Work