/cheer & /cry

Yes’m, /cheer & /cry in the same heartbeat.  (this is a /rant, so quit reading if you don’t want to read a /rant, lol).  Haven’t tossed in much RL here, and this just blows my mind, so I figured I’d share.

So yes, the office that is responsible for a set of records during a certain span of the record’s life…  I need to have them pull a list of a specific group within their records, and give it to me to utilize for something productive.  So it’s cool, I send down the request, expecting to receive it in like 2 weeks (about 1.5 weeks longer than it should take) and lo & behold….   I get it back within the hour!!!

/cheer!!!!!

I open it.

/cry….

Yes, each record has a unique identifier.  As in, I don’t even need anything else in that report, so long as I have that identifier.  Like, I can literally get the rest of the info from 5 other sources, including my own records.  But do they have that ONE FRIGGIN PIECE of info in there?

Nope.

ARGH!!!!!

So of course it takes hours of work to pair this list back up with the ID’s.  So I’m a week ahead of expected schedule, right?  I should be happy, right?  Except now it has taken hours to do an unexpected task, delaying everything else.

Could I have asked them for a proper file?  Yes.  Would it have done any good?  No – they don’t bother with the ID’s on any of their reports.  They just sort alphabetically.

Dude, did you know that there’s more than one John Smith in the world?  And that there might be 1 of them in the file you just gave me?  How the hell am I supposed to figure out if it’s John L. Smith or John L. Smith…  Whoops, guess the middle name is the same.  Addresses?  Oh, that’s right, you didn’t have one listed for him.  Anything else in the file?  Not really.  So 1 of them is in your list and 2 or more are in the full database.  Great, that was about as useful as me asking you for a report in the first place obviously….

Ugh.  If you’re responsible for something, you should be responsible for it.  We’ve tried fixing this problem with them for years, but nothing works.  We just have to wait until the records become ours (in that lifecycle) so we can correct everything.

Sooo, now to doing productive things with said list.  It involves free food at the end of the tunnel for everyone on the list, and even free gifts.  So I guess I can’t be too upset (since I get them too).  But just think of how much farther my alts would be if I didn’t have to waste time correcting other people’s mistakes!