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| Thursday, April 05, 2007 |
| Today's Confusion Brought To You By Ata |
Truly, I am the Queen of Havoc. My loyal knights, Chaos, Mayhem, and Disorder ride in my wake. Behind me lies a trail littered with stress, anxiety, and embarrassment, and my ego flies in tatters like a shredded flag.
Did I ever tell you about the time I accidentally ordered 75 mini vibrators for the physiotherapy department of a hospital? The supplier got them in specially for us from America, and they could not be returned (the supplier did, however, agree to buy them back as needed, and eventually they were all sold). How about the time I mixed up packet quantities with carton quantities, and had 20 pallets of adult continence supplies delivered to a nursing home. In Mount Gambier, a six-hour drive from Adelaide. Oh yeah. The couriers loved me for that one.
Today, however, I attempted a larger scale of destruction. Perhaps in some subconscious effort at revenge on couriers for the struggles they caused me way back when I worked at the healthcare supplies provider, I effectively shut down a courier company for about four hours. It happened like this.
I was in the throes of a very tangled account reconciliation, and attempting to work out what purchase order numbers were in our system that had not been used. I discussed it with my supervisor, who told me to print off an Estimated Liabilities report, which would show me basically what I wanted to know. He showed me roughly where to look for the report in the software, and left me to it. The first one I printed off fine. No worries. When I went to do the second one, however, I saw something different - an option which I thought might possibly give me more information. Hooray! So I selected it. Hm. "Options" - no, that's just where I select how I want it to print out, cancel out of here. I hit F9, being the key I was used to using in this software when performing a different task to go back to what I was looking at. This is the critical bit. F9 isn't so much a "back" instruction as an "accept" instruction - I'm very new to this particular application, having been using it only a couple of days to do some very limited things. In other areas of the program, I need to press F9 to accept the options I'm looking at & go back to the main transactions I'm working on. In this module, however, F9 caused the print to start. I had a small moment of panic, as it began displaying the record numbers of what it was printing - purchase orders for a particular supplier. It didn't seem to be stopping, so I located the cancel instruction. Phew. Cancelled. And at only 92 records. Great.
I went & checked the printer. Nope, nothing there. Then I recalled - I don't have a proper profile set up, so any changes I make to the default printers get reset as soon as I log off. The computer usually resets itself to printing to the PDF writer. Good. No harm, no foul, no enormous printouts waiting to surprise me.
About a half-hour later, I get a phone call. It's from the supplier - the same account I was working on. What a coincidence, thinks I. I cannot take calls directly, so I arrange to call them back rather than take it at someone else's desk. When I try to call, I can't get through. It's busy. I keep trying. Five or six attempts later, I get through.
"Are you sending us something?" asks the nice girl at the other end. That's when the penny drops - it didn't send to the PDF writer, it sent the records to the supplier's fax number. Bugger.
"How many pages do you have?" queries Ata. It seems twelve pages have gone through. I apologise. Terribly sorry. No, you don't need to do anything, and I've cancelled it at this end. All good.
Twenty minutes or so later, I get another call. There are still pages coming through. The nice girl is sounding a little less nice.
To truncate the story somewhat at this point - There were a number of difficult phone calls, during which I tried to explain there was nothing I could do, it was gone from our system and could not be stopped. They tried turning their fax off and on, to no avail. I spent two hours asking everyone I could think of, googling fruitlessly for help, I spoke to the support people for the software application (who assured me that I wasn't the first one to do this but no, they couldn't help), and in the end, there was nothing I could do. I found the website that let me track sent items, but all that showed me was that I had sent them. I got a delivery confirmation emailed every time one went through, but I could do nothing to stop them going through. They apparently had a very little tiny fax machine, because it took four hours for all 92 pages to be delivered.
And the best bit? Their fax and phone used the same line, so they were effectively unable to take or make calls for four hours across the middle of the day. Fantastic. Oh, I shall be taking good care to see that their account is paid As Quickly As Humanly Possible. |
posted by Ata @ 7:51 pm  |
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| 4 Comments: |
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Argh...!! I would just want to crawl into a hole somewhere and hide for an Extremely Long Time.
Poor Ata. Poor company at the other end. I hope they at least managed to recycle all that paper.
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That's pretty much what I was thinking. Poor Ata, did you want to hid under a desk?
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Eeeek... That sucks!
But at least you have amusing stories to tell. *grin*
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Ah that is soooo funny.
And tragic.
What a pity you didn't have the trusty knight Sir Cease on your side.
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Argh...!! I would just want to crawl into a hole somewhere and hide for an Extremely Long Time.
Poor Ata. Poor company at the other end. I hope they at least managed to recycle all that paper.