Just Friggin’ Let Me Do My Job

I’m just plain livid.  You know I have to be if I’m writing a second post about work in one day.  And it’s about the same “clients”/department.  Damned troublemakers.

Anyway, a little back story.

After my arrival, I was handed this small little project to finish implementing the pathology interfaces for the lab department.   Basically they’d already been done, they just needed some tweaking — ADT, orders, results, and billing.  And the “go-live” went beautifully over a year ago.

However, there’ve been a few issues with their billing.  Mostly it’s user error.  Those of you who work in IT understand what I mean.  Generally it’s because of something someone in the lab department has changed on their side and didn’t think to tell anyone over here.

One time, they changed when their billing file was generated and then couldn’t figure out why our scripts weren’t picking them up at night.  Well, if we pick them up at 10pm and you generate them at 10:05pm…

Anyway, they did some sort of upgrade Tuesday night before the billing file was generated and when it was time for the billing file to be picked up by our side, we didn’t get any billing file, though they insist there was one.

Now, here’s one of the pet peevy things.  They are supposed to call the help desk and log a problem when billing doesn’t work and then the help desk will page the Inteface Duty Officer for that week.  We have a rotation.

What they do is email me.

So, I emailed them back and said that I tried to ftp to their server to get the file manually and got an error saying that there is no such ftp directory, meaning that there is something wrong with their server.  That was at 9am.  I said that if they didn’t fix it, the billing wouldn’t work that night either.

When I hadn’t heard back by 2pm, I thought I’d call and talk to the person in charge of the application.  Mind you, this is someone who “tattled” that I hadn’t brought a pen to a meeting.  For the next hour and a half, slow emails went back and forth between myself, her, and some tech support person on her side who apparently didn’t have a lot of experience with ftp, about what to do.  They wanted to manually (re: email) me the files for the billing from the night before.  I wanted to know what they were going to do about the billing for that night.

Round and round it went.

I did indicate to the lab person that I was leaving the office at 3:30pm but I had my pager and would be at home where I could dial in and I wanted her to page me when they knew what they wanted to do.  I told her I would do what she wanted.  I gave her my pager number twice.

Here’s the kicker.  I talked to MJ who was taking over being the Interface DO and she wanted nothing to do with the issue, which is what I wanted.  I wanted to finish handing the problem.  For some reason, the lab person didn’t like my answers and had started including FHW on the emails — I’ve noticed she does this — so I talked to him and he said he had no interest in being involved and I asked him to stay out of it.  I told him that I gave her my pager number and told her to page me.

No one paged me.

When I got into work this morning, the first email I saw was from FHW at 5:04pm last night telling the lab person that he and MJ had resolved her billing issue from the night before and turned off the script so it wouldn’t try to run the billing last night.

WTF?!

So, I talked to my boss,which is actually when I learned about the whole “pen/meeting” issue, and I expressed my frustration with the lab that I can’t do my job if they run to FHW every time.  Why didn’t they page me?  Why didn’t they page the Interface DO in the first place?  (Mind you, I was the Interface DO at the time, but it’s the principle.)
I also expressed my frustration with FHW that I can’t do my job if FHW jumps in after I’ve asked him not to get involved and he does it anyway.  Obviously no one is going to respect me and expect me to be able to do my job if he does that.  Yes, he likes to be the hero, but so do I.  No wonder people wonder about my capability if I don’t bring a pen.
Now that I think about it, FHW never brings a pen to a meeting either.

tags: work

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