Needs wooden table...



  • Not the most hilarious post of the day... but still... I had a good laugh when it happened.

    We are building reports for a large retailer. To validate the reports we need to verify the reports to what the stores have in their systems.

    Fine, we pick a store, pick a couple of weeks, email one of our superusers and get him to ask for reports from the store for that timeperiod.

    We wait a couple of days... then the boss walks in with a 4" thick envelope addressed to us...

    Turns out this is how a report request is processed.

    Us -> email superuser -> superuser calls store manager -> store manager generates excel report from store system -> store prints excel report -> store faxes excel report to superuser -> superuser puts 100 pages of fax into envelope -> snailmails it to us.

     I am going to have a serious talk with these persons come monday... how can this pristine business process work without them using the wooden table and crappy camera provided by us!



  • @unfriendly said:

     I am going to have a serious talk with these persons come monday
    Why are you waiting until Monday? Did you write the serious talk down and mail it back to them?



  • @bstorer said:

    @unfriendly said:
     I am going to have a serious talk with these persons come monday
    Why are you waiting until Monday? Did you write the serious talk down and mail it back to them?
     

    The snailmail takes until monday to arrive...



  •  When you snailmail them back don't forget to include the mail you're answering to. That's how it's done in email, I don't see why you should deviate in this case :)



  • @DOA said:

     When you snailmail them back don't forget to include the mail you're answering to. That's how it's done in email, I don't see why you should deviate in this case :)

     

     

    But the original mail was 4" thick when printed.  It would take a very long time to put the ">" in front of each line. 


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @sibtrag said:

    It would take a very long time to put the ">" in front of each line. 

    Send it as an attachment instead? Piece of thread/string/rope/CAT5/Etherkiller* on the original envelope to the new one?

    * As inappropriate.



  • Just a thought, but how big would the spreadsheet be on disk? If the store manager doesn't have access to an email service that can handle big attachments they might be stuck with this workaround. Of course, a 10MB+ Excel spreadsheet is probably a WTF in and of itself, but bloat in Microsoft Office file formats is old news.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    Just a thought, but how big would the spreadsheet be on disk? If the store manager doesn't have access to an email service that can handle big attachments they might be stuck with this workaround. Of course, a 10MB+ Excel spreadsheet is probably a WTF in and of itself, but bloat in Microsoft Office file formats is old news.

    The store manager should have put the document on a cd and sent that instead.

    OTOH maybe the manager owned a paper-manufacturing company.



  • @julmu said:

    The store manager should have put the document on a cd and sent that instead.

    Depends on whether the office supplies budget extends to blank CDs, I suppose, or if the store PC had a CD burner.



  • @sibtrag said:

    @DOA said:

     When you snailmail them back don't forget to include the mail you're answering to. That's how it's done in email, I don't see why you should deviate in this case :)

     

     

    But the original mail was 4" thick when printed.  It would take a very long time to put the ">" in front of each line. 

    Not to mention all the carbon paper you'd waste if your boss needed a copy of it, too.


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