Re: not neccessarily very good at brown-nosing...
Working for one retailer I was doing some stuff at one shop on a hot Friday afternoon including training. The manager stopped me at one point and said that I had to finish now as they had to input stock returns into the system. Curious I asked what they had to do and was shown a list of items that they had returned to head office. There were about 100 in total with 80 different item codes and it was a printed list that had come from an email. The list came from what had been received at head office and staff were expected to input this into the system for stock control. Basically the manager would sit inputting the data into the computer (the only one in the place) whilst another employee read it out to her. I said that's daft because it gave opportunities for errors to creep in. Why don't you import it from the data you've been sent on the email? They didn't know that was possible and actually neither did I at the time. However I had a look and it just needed converting to a CSV file whereupon it was easily imported.
I showed the manager how easy it was to convert the data and she thought it was genius. This wasn't the proper procedure that the company had laid down but it was faster a damn site faster. Well I was happy as was the shop manager but head office were not and said it had to be done manually. Their displeasure was evidenced by the fact that a month later my contract was not renewed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
