The irony of this is NOT lost on me.
Having worked in IT for long enough to see some pretty fucking dumb things happen, it's my turn to be on the receiving end of it.
In my line of work we work to provide users with a consistent (generally trying to avoid it being consistently shit) experience, the idea that you go to a portal page when you can ask for help, or ask for something. Then behind that stuff happens and you're told either it's approved or it's rejected (and why).
So take my current predicament, I need a replacement handset (mobile phone). The idea being I go to a site where I search till I find the option to "order a standard handset" or some such. Then the powers that be will review and hopefully approve before it gets ordered (or fulfilled from stock if that exists).
Compare with the actual experience, from the first site you find "Procurement" then a specific menu of "Assisted buying" which then launches you onto another site. It's all got to be authenticated so you think it passed me through without me having to click on "Login" again? No, but at least the cookie got me in without doing a full authentication process.
Next you're presented with some options and "Go Shopping" looks pretty fine to me. Except that once you start down this path you're on the "Non standard" shopping option where you have to describe everything in order to get it. Not what I want, so back to the previous menu and it seems I need to do an "Advance Catalog Search". It's a standard pissing mobile phone for fucks sake.
So a few clicks later I've got the shopping cart, except if I try to proceed I'm presented with a number of errors for mandatory fields and incorrectly completed fields that are all around which cost center and other such financial details are to be charged. HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I KNOW I'VE NEVER SEEN THIS SYSTEM BEFORE!
Some more muddling around and eventually I find a way to submit the request. Total cost just over €130. This number is important, as apparently it being over €100 means I need to e-mail someone to get their approval to spend this money. Someone in another country several timezones removed, who's got a job title like "CFO". Yes dear CFO you're apparently not busy so can you approve this €130 spend.
Let's play the "How much has this cost so far?" game.
I've now spent ~ 2hours dealing with this shit storm process and tool. I'm a cheap consultant so that's ~ €350 of my working time wasted.
The CFO is now getting chased by me.... repeated pestering e-mails, because clearly they've got NOTHING BETTER TO DO. Even allowing for the entire attention grabbing event to take no more than 30 minutes including drafting some e-mail response to hopefully say I can have the damn phone and then also tell me to politely fuck off, that's another €50 or so of their time. So the company has now saved a grand total of Fuck All, and cost itself in the order of €400 - so far - and I haven't even been able to submit the order yet.
So next time you're hacked off at the latest shit system that IT have given you, remember it's human fuck wits that decide how it's supposed to work.
