Avatar

Two For Joy

@asinglemagpie / asinglemagpie.tumblr.com

Three decades in, maxing out my posts with art, humour, facepalms, fandoms, memes, nature, and a witchy undercurrent.
Posts
Avatar
Reblogged vvitchella
Avatar

“lol why are you following the boobs and ass artist” why do you think I’m following the boobs and ass artist. do you think I go to the grocery store ironically too

Avatar
Reblogged vvitchella
Avatar

I only had the thought yesterday spurred by a much larger desire to throw my phone into the sea so know I'm no authority but if you're reading this and own a smartphone-

Gently takes your hand

Take ten minutes. Go into your settings. Turn off notifications for every single app that isn't your phone, your texts, and anything you require in your daily life. For me, that's my work email and messenger. Everything else completely off. Go to every setting category and turn them all off. You can go through and individually turn back on what you need after if you make a mistake later.

Now take your phone off mute. Go to sound settings. Pick a new ringtone. Pick a nice notification sound. Adjust system sound settings and vibrations. Keep your volume on and put your phone down.

Congrats, you now have a phone marginally closer to the way phones functioned a decade ago. It will beep when you get a text and ring when you get a call and not much else unless you tell it otherwise. You will feel significantly better. You will feel a little silly you didn't do this earlier. But it's not our fault we got bullied into carrying around bricks that demanded our attention every 5 minutes and forced us to live with our phones on mute 24/7 to cope with it.

Avatar
Reblogged
Avatar

today was the day we finalized the migration of essential software at work from some old and busted shit that was ready to die at any time, to the new cloud version of the same software that we are no longer responsible for maintaining. which is good because no one was actually maintaining ours. it's just been slowly crufting into unusability for a decade. so anyway they set aside an hour for a teams meeting where they'd walk us through the different interface and how to go through normal processes.

"it's not that big a change," they said. "it's all the same stuff, it just looks a little different," they said.

they did not account for the fact that the primary user of this software is someone who doesn't actually know how it works or what it's doing. they learned how to do their job entirely through rote memorization. they know which buttons they are supposed to press in which order, and that is the full extent of what they know. they also did not account for the fact that this person's processes were learned thirdhand from other people who were not using this software normally to begin with.

it's like. imagine if someone had only ever used tumblr in the app. and you try to get them to use it in a desktop browser, but they cannot figure out how to post. and you go through explaining where the button is and how to format text and add tags, even though you could have sworn it was all the same in the app. but then they're like, "okay, but what's the phone number" and you're like "what" and they're like "the phone number to call to make a post?" and it turns out somehow they still had the ability to post by calling a phone number, and every time they posted on the app they called the post in first and then edited the audio post to transcribe it into text before screenshotting the text for a photo post. and nothing you can say to them will make them understand that none of that is necessary or correct. they shouldn't have even been able to do some of that. they can just type into the post box now, like a civilized person. "okay," they say, "but what is the phone number, though? because when i made my account my friend gave me this checklist and the first thing on it is to call the number."

so anyway we were on that teams call for almost three hours and they still don't have a handle on the new software

Avatar

details have been changed but i want you to imagine that this software is used in part to record payments and send out updated invoices. in this software there is a special process to send invoices to collections. generally, you use special filters to determine what does and does not get sent off to collections. but this person kept asking that poor trainer to run the collections wizard on all invoices. every one of them. unpaid. paid. brand new. all of them. and the trainer is like. i am not doing that actually. and the person keeps insisting. "i need the report" they keep saying. "this isn't a report" the trainer keeps explaining.

as far as anyone can tell, decades ago, the person who first worked with this software added a custom report that prints before you can run the collections wizard. they would go through that report manually highlighting every invoice going to collections, with a highlighter, because they didn't trust the software. because this was old software without any kind of autosave functionality, they could just abort the collections wizard after they got the report, before doing it again and manually flagging the invoices they highlighted. everyone using this software since then has just. done that. assuming it was necessary for some reason.

"please," the trainer kept saying. "can you tell me what the report is called. what is the report. can you scan the report and send it to me. we can just run the report. we don't need to run the collections wizard. we actually specifically should not. there is no report here. we would need to add that in if you want that. but you won't need to run this wizard to get that report. you can just get it. the report. without doing this."

"it's fine," they kept saying. "i can show you the report. just hit okay on the wizard and it should pop up."

Avatar

@grison-in-space your tags pass peer review

Avatar

Having had actual significant success with these people:

  • learn to identify them immediately: if someone starts asking you about "the collections wizard", and it makes no sense, stop, stop trying to explain it to them with shortcuts, and ask them to take you through their old process. This will ascertain for certain that you are dealing with This Person.
  • once you have identified them - and this is very important - accept that they did things by rote, and that ergo any change to that rote process is not, actually, "just a little bit different". It is a whole new process.
  • No seriously just fucking accept it. Accept it immediately. You are now working with someone who has never used the kind of software or process or thing you are trying to teach them before. They have arrived before you a blank slate. You are starting from the beginning.
  • if for some reason you are too rigid to do this, or do not have enough time, or just want to commit murder, this is the point where you run the opposite direction or hire someone else. but tell the someone-else this much.
  • if you're not too rigid or overloaded: now you need to make them understand that this new process is Totally Different.
  • Explain to them: forget about the old way. I'm so sorry - this is a total new way. I know. I know it's awful. It's Head Office's Fault. It's just how it is. I know they told you it would just be a little change. They lied. You can't do anything the old way anymore.
  • I don't care if this isn't really true. It doesn't matter if it's really true. It's true for them, because they knew this new way by-rote, not by-understanding-the-underlying-principles. They now have to learn a new rote.
  • (please note: if you are still going 'but it's just a little bit different - !' YOU are now, in fact, this person. Your by-rote is insisting that learning works the way it worked for you, and that using a system requires the way that you interact with the system. It doesn't! Remember that you also have to be flexible, as you demand someone change their system (that used to work fine for them) For You.)
  • Stop trying to short-cut this step. Short-cutting this step will just make you both cry. Just accept you have to do this the long way. It's good for you. It'll build character.
  • You will indeed get more pushback/upset at the beginning if you admit that you're needing them to learn something Entirely New. But it will be less than the rage/frustration/betrayal/resentment you get when you told them it was just a little change, and they end up having to re-learn everything they ever knew about doing their job, AND now they feel like either you lied to them or you're condescending to/judging them, and they hate you.
  • Yeah that's totally a lot of work, isn't it. But you gotta do it! (You do GOTTA do it, right? You didn't just decide to change things Because It's Neater This Way or for another reason that prioritized your sense of what's Correct over that of those actually doing the job, right - it was for a reason?) (Oh good, glad to hear it, so I reiterate: yeah, it's a lot of work but you gotta do it.)
  • Plan for this to take a realistic amount of time, which is about three times as long as the amount of time you wanted to tell the person you report to it should take, which is still going to be less time than it'll take if you DON'T just fucking plan for the fact that you'll need to retrain people from the ground up and then end up with three hours of a teams meeting and people crying because nobody understands at the end of it.
  • Finally: if you hire someone else to do it, do make sure THEY understand all of the above as well, and aren't going to be a dick to your staff about it.

You're welcome!

Avatar

COSIGNED

Avatar

I am in this post and don't like it.

Avatar
Reblogged crazycatsiren
Avatar
ramdom333-deactivated20240825

please be nice to women. our hormones give us like 1 good week every month

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.