Re: OT: Working from home

I can top that one! My first real Oracle job was at a company that was trying to convert from being a mainframe service bureau to becoming an open systems software vendor - when Oracle and open systems were near heresy in the business world. Only one other person and myself in the entire company were doing this "non-traditional" work. The rest couldn't understand why their twenty-some year old "standard form" didn't work for us. (it didn't actually work for them either, but they were comfortable with it.) The time sheet was broken up into 0.1 hour increments. Yup! Six minutes! Every entry had to have 17 individual mandatory fields filled in - machine#, job#, client#, runtime, function code, service code, progress state, authorization#, ad nauseum. None of it made any sense to me. Every "code" was a two, or three, or more digit number. There were yellow antiquated hardcopy lookup sheets for some of them. For some, there wasn't even a sheet! There were 87 different function codes, no lookup, and nobody knew what most of them meant. In addition, they had written a custom application in Unisys Mapper to "help" people enter their time. Every technical employee was mandated to go the Mapper terminal in the public area in "programmer's alley" (a hallway lined on both sides with office doors - yes! We had offices, not cubes!) and enter their time - preferably on a daily basis, at least weekly. I made the mistake of commenting on the user-hostility of the Mapper app to the person showing me how to use it - before I knew that he had designed and written it! No lookups? No data validation? (It just rejected the entire lot when you "committed" if there were any mistakes, like leaving off a leading zero!) There wasn't even any obviously meaningful boilerplate text on the screen! He retorted, "Its simple! Just hit the XMIT key, go to the upper left corner, type "g,,,,,,6,,1,,,<employee number>,,,,", then hit GO. That gets you to the main screen. Now to get to the time entry screen, type..." and so on for another ten minutes of verbal instructions to show how to enter a *six minute* time quanta! His entire monologue sounded to me like someone trying to translate ancient hebrew to hexidecimal. There were, of course, NO written instructions. The first time I tried to enter a week's worth of time, I spent almost a full day on it and was in a very serious state of frustration!

Since I wasn't actually working on anything billable to a client, but rather on designing and building a new line of Oracle-based software products to be offered for sale at some later date, none of this really applied anyway. Finally, some kind soul told me that nobody ever read the details anyway and that they were only useful for the automated billing programs . I tried just not doing them, but soon found out that there was a summary report showing hours worked by employee - by day, week, and month - that management actually looked at, so that didn't fly. The aforementioned kind soul then helped further by showing me how to copy an entire day of entries to the next day (the only useful feature of the program!). I just put in a bunch of activities under obscure categories that were a complete mystery to everyone (e.g. "QUALITY CIRCLE"?), used the function codes that nobody could explain, etc. I loaded up a day of this gibberish and just copied it every day for the next year or so! Since the total hours showed up on the one report that they actually looked at, management never again complained!

After about a year of this nonsense, I redesigned and rewrote the entire beast in SQL*Forms 2 and Oracle over a three day weekend. I cleaned up the design, made it infinitely more usable, eliminated all the obsolete codes, replaced the others with semi-meaningful words, created lookups and defaults on fields, and generally updated the entire mess by about 25-30 years. (I kept the "clone-a-day" feature though!) Management loved it. They wanted to make it a commercial product, which I barely managed to discourage. It is still the "project" of which I am most ashamed.

-Don Granaman
[OraSaurus]

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 12:40 PM

> Lets not get into how we divied up time ..... otherwise I will be here for
> days !!
>
> We had to account for each 15 minute block ..... and THAT was when we
were
> working in the office ! Our time sheets took, on average, about 2 hours
out
> of each 2 week period to prepare.
>
> In my new job, they have us put a check on the day we were here .... and a
> check in a different box if it was vacation or whatever. Our time sheets
> take about 10 seconds.

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Author: Don Granaman
  INET: granaman_at_home.com

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