Category: Geeky Stuff

You know back in the day computers were supposed to make things better, more efficient, faster. They were supposed to make a better world…

Jump to 2019

I just spent an hour having to rename paycheck stubs from ADP. There’s a nifty little “Download” button that will allow you to download you paycheck stub. But there’s no provision for downloading a few or ALL your paycheck stubs where they have some kind of coherent name. By the time I’d downloaded all the paychecks I had 90 files named “Ajax-XXX”.

Completely useless, if you’re looking for information from a particular paycheck or wanting to group paychecks by year. The download routine could easily have said, “Pay Statement yyyymmdd”. Yeah that wouldn’t tell you which company but at least you’d know the time period of the statement without opening it. How about allowing a complete download of all pay statements at once instead of forcing the user to click download on each one? 

In point of fact the only filename that ADP sends is Ajax, my computer added the -XXX since it knew that I probably didn’t want to overwrite the original Ajax file with each subsequent Ajax file which would have left me with only 1 file containing the last statement I looked at.

Most bank statements, credit card statements, and any other statements you download do the same thing. Instead of writing a few more lines of code that make the filenames useful, the programmers leave you with crappy, meaningless filenames that you have to rename.

How about Chase Credit Statement YYYYMMDD, or Goldman Sachs 401K and a date, Edison YYYYMMDD. 

And while I know in America we write our dates Month/day/year. For the purposes of sorting filenames with a computer, using yearmonthday makes a lot more sense. If you do it the American way you’ll end up with all the April statements form multiple years clumped together.

It’s just lazy thoughtless programming.

Then there’re the companies that create overarching management software to control their suite of programs. (You know who you are) at first glance this seems like a good idea and could in fact be a good idea, EXCEPT that this management software allows you to modify or remove one application in the suite, then without warning goes off and deletes half a dozen other applications in the background. Then you go back to put the bit of the suite that you actually wanted to keep back on your computer and find that you can’t. Why? because said company downloads their “New improved lemon scented” application manager to your computer while you were deleting the application you no longer use. And NOW they want to to sign up for their subscription service.

Ahem. NO!

After careful evaluation, I used their new application manager to delete their entire suite of products in favor of cheaper, faster, and smaller products from another vendor that does the same thing, better!

I’ve had this little scenario play out three times over the past week. I’m not amused.

The reason that the paycheck stubs were so in my face is because of filing out the unemployment insurance forms online. EDD knew who I worked for and for how long, they displayed that information when I finally got logged into their system.

So why did EDD want me to manually calculate and disclose to them my quarterly income. Which I had to download the checkstubs to calculate. If EDD already had access to the payroll information why couldn’t their computers just calculate the quarterly information for the last 3 years? I thought that was what computers are supposed to do.  Was it some kind of test? Was it one of those stupid laws designed to catch criminals, that never work because the criminals know better than I what to disclose to make things look right and what information to withhold?  And therefore since I just answered the questions as they were asked did I just screw myself by answering honestly?

I personally think that unemployment should kick in and be started by the employer. It should be turned off automatically when you’ve used up your allotment or when you start a new job.  It should be simple, seamless, and efficient.  Why do we have people jumping through hoops answering questions that various entities already have the answers to?

But EDD goes above and beyond with their fabulous software. For reasons that I couldn’t figure out, I had to resubmit the same page, The one dealing with the quarterly earnings calculations 3 times. And with each resubmission request the system would blank all the data I’d plugged in. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to screen capture that page before I pressed submit. 

That meant that all I had to do was re-enter the information repeatedly, instead of recalculate the information.

I’m sure that there are folks who’ve had to do it all over again and again because hey, the expectation is that the EDD web page would take the information properly the first time.

These are some of the things that Software Testers (at least the Manual Testers) normally catch. This is why manual and automated testing should work hand in hand. It’s also why you only release software after real users have had a crack at it. Real users do stuff that you never anticipate and uncover interesting bugs.

So all you automated testing folks keep at it and keep delivering software that does annoying things that you never anticipated. 

Live it up, But not on my dime, I’ll get rid of software that’s glitchy faster than superman.