My teeth are gritted in impotent rage this afternoon after wasting, and I fucking mean wasting, a morning thanks to DEMONware. (I keep linking to their site in the hopes that someone googling them will come here and realize what a piece of shit product it is and spare their employees some misery. Enterprise system my ass, here’s an enterprise to occupy you, you programmers of DEMONware, fucking cram it.)
{On the advice of an attorney (for reals, yo), I took out the name (changing it to the more accurate DEMONware) and the link to the enterprise sofware system company that rhymes with neeple doft. Luckily, it’s out there on a list of things that suck, courtesy of some like-minded folks at UConn.}

Today’s adventure was to go into the live production system and compare it to the old, phased out finance system’s data. Let’s just say that there are ~15 researchers who have accounts from which they can pay for their research. Then, conservatively, let’s say they have seven account numbers each (That is quite conservative, since a couple have about 20 each). OK, that’s 105 account numbers. The new system has a new interface and a new numbering scheme from the old system, so there is no common logical construct governing the looking up of these numbers. For example what was 9515102 in the old system is now 9500088; there is no correlation, no equivalent values just a brand new random number with the same number of digits and prefix series. For mere mortals, who do not compute number series like, say, a computer, that’s a pretty fucking cruel hoax.

Now, let’s take those 105 account numbers and assume it takes us 30 seconds to look up the old number in one system, and another 1.5 minutes to look up the new number given the steep learning curve of becoming familiar with a new seven-digit number series. That’s two minutes per account number, or 210 minutes or 3.5 hours. There were two of us at a two-hour session, so that’s essential 4.0 hours of commitment. So we are left with a half hour between us to actually compare the data, or 0.3 minutes, or 18 seconds, for each account number to verify (a) we can even access the data and (b) whether the data correlates. My name ain’t Cray, and I ain’t no super computer.

All of that equals a complete sinkhole of time wasted. It would have been better spent allowing someone to thump me in the temples with a ball peen hammer repeatedly until I passed out. And, it would have been more pleasurable.