Beggars Belief



  • As one of the many techs involved in the UK national bus pass scheme I couldn't help but laugh at a recent piece of absurdity I came across:

    For the last month or so we'd been using a temporary system to store photo's for the new ID's with the intention of doing a bulk load into the new system once it came online - seemed simple enough to us - the loader couldn't possibly have a problem with the 6-700 records we'd amassed in the meantime.  Imagine my horror when we discovered the 'process' for importing the photos into the new system consisted of printing out the stored photos and then 'holding them in front of the camera' to complete the import.   Hooray for the 21st century...




  •  Only the wooden table is missing .... 



  • It's not that bad. It involves testing the camera, and the system workflow. If you were to pump jpgs to your DB that would be a totally different test, and that shouldn't be done with a few hundred pics, but should be run with an image count that is a multiple of the expected load, or simply run until crash.



  • @keigezellig said:

     Only the wooden table is missing .... 

    Make it a wooden wall behind the camera ;-)


  • WTF, did SpectateSwamp design this system?



  • @dancer said:

    As one of the many techs involved in the UK national bus pass scheme
     

    Is this a government scheme, and does it in some way involve one of the big five consulting firms? Because I'm far less surprised by the idiocy, if so. I think I've become desensitized to it. 



  • @Vanders said:

    @dancer said:

    As one of the many techs involved in the UK national bus pass scheme
     

    Is this a government scheme, and does it in some way involve one of the big five consulting firms? Because I'm far less surprised by the idiocy, if so. I think I've become desensitized to it. 

     

    Government scheme but blessedly free of Big 5 involvement.  They're not the sole providers of procedural stupidity though - this particular marvel was the creation of a government employee, a quick chat to the supplier identified a wide variety of bulk import methods none of which involved holding printouts up to cameras.  Common sense be damned - why ask your software supplier for the answer to a problem when you can waste your time coming up with something ridiculously complex that meets requirements only by the loosest possible interpretation of said requirements (incorporating of course a reckless disregard for public expenditure and time).

    But as we're told: This is not the Real World.  This is Government.



  • @dancer said:

    this particular marvel was the creation of a government employee, a quick chat to the supplier identified a wide variety of bulk import methods none of which involved holding printouts up to cameras.  Common sense be damned - why ask your software supplier for the answer to a problem when you can waste your time coming up with something ridiculously complex that meets requirements only by the loosest possible interpretation of said requirements (incorporating of course a reckless disregard for public expenditure and time).
     

    Just wait until project version n+1, when this operating procedure will be added to the spec, because "that'sthe way we do things", and this will become the official and only supported method of bulk importing.

    Or does that only happen here? hmm. 



  • @RayS said:

    @dancer said:

    this particular marvel was the creation of a government employee,
     

    Just wait until project version n+1, when this operating procedure will be added to the spec, because "that'sthe way we do things", and this will become the official and only supported method of bulk importing.

     

    Hey, at that point you can then create a new full-time position within whichever department you work for, neatly creating a shiney new "important" job for one of your chums. It's genius I tell you!

    I'll stop now before this becomes a political rant.



  • @Vanders said:

    I'll stop now before this becomes a political rant.
     

    ooops! Too late!


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