What Pissed Me Off Yesterday?

Author’s Note: The Blog entry is a rant. I’m going to just type what I want to say . . . let it all out. Pardon the grammar mistakes.

What happened yesterday? What pissed me off? Was it work? It’s the obvious choice which is correct. Anything outside work including family, friends, and hobbies—no complaints.

What pissed me off at work? Brokers? No. Workload? No because I expected a barrage of requests from the brokers since 2006 ended. Management? No; however, it’s another Blog entry. Hitting the empty water container on the water cooler to the floor? Nah. I intentionally hit it; in other words, I choose to hit the container while maintaining my sanity, and I hit the container on two separate incidents. My co-worker calculating year end statistics? Yes. I’m pissed off at my company’s outdated and inefficient system to calculate stats.

My dumb-ass co-worker takes at least half a day to calculate statistics, and if nobody bothers him, he finishes in half a day. He uses a 1980s system of spreadsheets, moving files, copy and pasting data to different files, and using Access. The system is ancient history and takes way too long. A few of the brokers needed stats for their presentations and for their clients. Today, his body language, his physiological signs says it all: full of frustration and fatigue. Every 10 or 15 minutes, he breathes heavily as if he wanted to talk to someone. It’s not me. Stay away from me. You smell tobacco. Our third researcher, his outlet, was out sick. Perhaps, it was a good thing.

If anyone looks at the historical statistics, there are two observations one should notice easily. The first is the statistics, the format, the presentation, are the same from 1988 and today. No improvements. No innovations. No better and efficient way to calculate the stats. It’s as if he never understood the stats. He must use the same format, the same cumbersome procedure because they are the only way he knows what to do. The second observation is there is missing historical stats. The reason is in 1997, the server containing the stats crashed and he didn’t backup the data. My family and friends said he should have been fired. Why he is still working is a miracle and a mystery.

Today, we live in the Information Age where data and information are available quickly. Technology today enables people to gather, to analyze, to summarize, and to release quickly, efficiently, and accurately all at fast pace. With technology improving and innovating consistently forever and infinite, it’s going to get better and faster for information to communicate to the world. When I upload my Blogs and send emails to my friends, it’s a matter of seconds when the whole world read my Blogs and my friends reads my emails.

In my company, the three researchers are trained in Crystal Reports, yet only I use Crystal. Unfortunately, I’m still a beginner and I learn Crystal on my spare time at home for which if I knew more Crystal, I can do my job 100 times more quickly, efficiently, and accurately (and find another job, LOL). If a company fails to recognize and to accept we live in the Information Age, then its inevitable the company is going out of business.

My co-worker managed to complete the stats. With all the interruptions, it took at least the entire day. I’m very certain he started working on the stats on Monday. My company and my co-worker failed to use today’s technology to calculate stats monthly, quarterly, and yearly quickly, efficiently, and accurately. If our competitors know about the weakness, my company is screwed. Furthermore, my company talks about the latest technology and how technology is important to stay ahead of the curve. To me, it’s all talk because my company fails to use the latest technology to smash our competitors and to create a more efficient and more productive company. For example, my company has a new database which became online in March 2006. Today is January 2007 and the database has gone at least 30 revisions (I lost count). And there are still bugs and improvements needed. The database was never beta tested.