The cranky thread

[Old Man]

FIL had a stroke.  Not devastating, but he's foggy enough that he probably can't live alone any more.  His primary care physician prescribed a foot cream.

[tkdguy]

Sorry to hear that, Old Man.

[Old Man]

I am being retrained to a new role at work.   at least 3 times the work, no increase in pay...  Theoretically the training could be marketable...   theoretically.

 

What kind of new role?

[Old Man]

For the first time in my life I owe money on my taxes.

 

I didn't plan for this so I have nothing to pay it with.

[Cancer]

Finally got the document I need to do taxes myself (we lost the first one in the late stages of the kitchen remodel process). That will start probably two weeks from now after I get Winter Quarter grades done and posted.

[tkdguy]

Second time a cat (different one) pukes on my bed. This time, I was lying down.

[Hermit]

I've a friend who, along with everyone else at their work place is losing their jobs because ...well, mostly bueracrats are trying to streamline the company to make it LOOK more profitable and trusting they can rebuild it up again in another state before quality degrades too much.

 

The 'closing date' has been moved forward a month more than once without warning.

And they've been told "It's nothing personal, it's just business"

which is a term I'd find laughable if it wasn't so profoundly pathetic.

[Cancer]

Now hear this: You are responsible for knowing how to use your tools.

 

In this case, students in my physics class, the tool in question is those lame-a$$ TI calculators that REQUIRE YOU TO USE PARENTHESES PROPERLY. But for the overwhelming pressure from a previous generation of marketing weenies, mathophobes explicitly including the education colleges in toto, and inertial laziness in general, you would not have to suffer the self-inflicted wounds of hardware that was intentionally designed to do the Wrong Thing.

 

There are many, many physics equations that involve fractions like 1/(2 pi) and 1/(4 pi). The physics is not going to change.

 

I see many, many cases of homework and exam answers involving these equations computed using the aforementioned booby traps where the answers are wrong by almost, but not quite, a factor of 10. THESE ARE YOUR FAULT. The not-quite-factor-of-ten is, more precisely and quite repeatedly, a factor of 9.8696....

 

Recognize it? That's a factor of pi squared. Where does it come from? BECAUSE YOU CLODS FORGET THE PARENTHESES and instead of multiplying by 1/(4 pi), you have multiplied by a factor of (1 / 4 * pi). Those are different by that factor of pi^2.

 

So, if you persist in using a well-known-to-be-broken tool like an algebraic calculator, then you deserve all the self-inflicted stabs in the eye with a broken stick that you get.

 

Because this RPN-using old man will point, mark down, and laugh at you.

[Burrito Boy]

A mouse built a nest in one of my boxes of roleplaying books and chewed on several books, including my 1979 copy of the Dungeon Master's Guide that had been in great condition.

[tkdguy]

Ouch! Sorry to hear that, BB.

[Enforcer84]

Rest in Peace, Uncle Earl.

My step-father's baby brother passed away today. He'd been in hospice for lung cancer and was one of the nicest men I've had the pleasure to meet. (on sadly, too few occasions)

 

And fuck cancer.

[Hermit]

My condlences

[Pattern Ghost]

Condolences, Enforcer.

 

Also to everyone else who lost someone since January. I haven't looked in the thread for a while, b/c I didn't want to see my own last post and be reminded. (I'm fine, just makes me a bit sad to think about, and I already have enough unpleasantness to think about.) Thanks to those who sent their sympathy.

[Enforcer84]

THanks guys and condolences to everyone for their losses as well. This year's shaping up to be a real shi...er crapper.

[tkdguy]

Sorry for your loss, Chad.

[Lawnmower Boy]

A Grumble About Technological Progress

 

So our company recently went to "computer assisted ordering." It's not a computer writing resupply orders based on sales movement; but, rather a computer "helping" us by generating an order which the department managers then revisit and revise. If they can. For a number of reasons, I suspected that there were going to be problems of implementation. I said so: but I will be the first to admit that I am a negative and cynical person with a skeptical view of "technological progress" in this latter day, and I admitted that I could easily be wrong, and would wait to see the results. 

 

I am also, thanks to extreme labour shortage, a sometime evening manager, and sometime department manager. It's a small department, thank Heavens, the "repack." I think it's standard practice in our industry for distribution to include a warehouse where items are repacked for distribution. This will include general merchandise such as houseware, medications and cosmetics; but also, for example, baby formula and spices. Basically, the idea is that you probably don't want, say, an entire box of six 1kg bottles of garlic powder, and these are opened at the warehouse and the individual items sent to the store in totes. (Those gray, plastic bins that you see at the drug store.) The baby formula and spices and such are "repack."

 

Though if there was ever  a time when all the items from the "repack" warehouse came in totes, it is long since past. Nowadays, the order contains all sorts of odds and ends, in boxes, loose, and in totes. 

 

"Computer-assisted ordering" consists of tracking items through the tills. So what'st he problem? It is that we are expecting the cashiers to individually swipe every item to build an accurate inventory, which is a bit much to ask of a green cashier in a hurry when a new mom with a cranky baby dumps two dozen pouches of miscellaneous baby food pouches on the belt --and also tricky from the point of view of anticipating sales. Take an extreme example. Saint Patrick's Day comes but once a year, and there's a run on green food colouring dye. That is, if Saint Paddie's happens on a weekend, and not a Thursday, and especially not if this particular Saint Patrick's Day comes a week before the centennial of the Easter Rising. (That's my excuse for getting hung with some green dye this year, anyway.) It'll be a long time, if ever, that our "expert system" can predict that there will be a run on green food colouring when Saint Patrick's Day falls on a weekend, but not so much on a Thursday, for example. Actually, a long time --several centuries, in fact-- before an expert system can predict this! "Give it time," they say. Centuries are not unreasonable for a single item; in the main, we just want to predict that the on-sale tortilla chips will sell more. Which is also hard, unless you are in the habit of telling the computer when the outside vendors of tortilla chips have their sales.

 

Hold the notion that computer-assisted ordering is hard in your mind, and move on to a new tranche of Technological Progress. A new, and more automated, warehouse.

 

The repack order doesn't go out every day. Traditionally, there are two orders a week, rotating through the districts, so that the staff at the warehouse are kept busy through the week. For example, in my district, the orders used to come Wednesday and Sunday. Then we moved the start of the ad back from Sunday to, eventually, Friday. This made it hard to order, and we moved the Wednesday order to Thursday. Still a bit tricky, because you had to order for the week (the order was due by Thursday afternoon, when the sales stickers were hung overnight Thursday-Friday. Since the Sunday order was due Monday, you effectively lost an entire weekend's sales if you weren't able to hold the ad in your head while writing the order on Thursday morning. And that's hard!)

 

Fortunately, big stores, like mine, get a second order, the day after the first of the week. This is thought of as a "clean-up" order, and is basically intended to avoid overburdening the stores on a single day. However, it was written Friday, after the ad was hung. Yay!

 

So we've moved to a new warehouse. And, because reasons, we've had to adjust the order schedule. It now goes, for our district: Thursday, Friday, Saturday. (This might have to do with rural Canada slowly dying on the vine, or with our selling divisions and buying divisions, of late.)

 

To be clear here, we now have three orders a week, and they come on consecutive days at the beginning of our sales week. Hunh?

 

So, this Friday, I was working with the order. Included were ten cases (120 pieces) of a big box of contact lens solution. 120 x $19.99 retail. Hunh, again? I went to the invoice: it was an "automatic substitution due to pack change." That is, the product used to come in single pieces, and now comes in cases. The software translated the order in pieces to the order in cases, and somehow did it wrong, so that instead of 10 boxes of contact solution becoming one case, 10 boxes became ten cases. So that's bad. Our store (and any others that happened to need that particular product that Friday) just became the new warehouses in charge of this product. It's going to be inflating our inventory numbers forever, and no-one else will get any. 

 

...On Saturday, we got another five. I check the order. The computer was perfectly aware that we now had two years worth of the product on hand. I checked the rest of the order. All of the items that came in on Friday had been duplicated. (We only got four cases of contact lens solution because the warehouse was out.) In other words, the Thursday-Friday-Saturday turnaround is too short for the computer system to update before generating the next order.

 

It's not just contact lens solution, either. Some cashier seems to have swiped a single Cranberry-almond meal replacement bar a dozen times, instead of doing all the flavours, so I got an entire box of them, when only a single one had sold. Fine: I managed to sneak them into the back of the display and corrected the inventory. That's how the system is supposed to work. But it was too late to stop another case from coming in the next order! And it continues:  store brand jello comes in large boxes for small sales, and goes into relatively limited space. (These things are far less well correlated than you'd think.) Now I have an entire case of store-brand raspberry jello to store for the next however long it takes to sell.

 

All of this applies to dozens of stores, which are very quickly getting choked with slow-moving merchandise, while the number of items out of stock at the warehouse grows and grows. We're now below 75% fill rate on our orders. I hope that that is largely because of the warehouse change, but if it isn't, we're going to reach a point where we have nothing to sell because all of the stock has been distributed, and is being stored in ingenious, inacccessible ways in the wrong stores. 

 

Technology will save us! 

[death tribble]

I really don't like when the clocks go forward. One less hour in bed.

[Ternaugh]

Most software systems are now programmed by the cheapest available "talent". That frequently means outsourcing to someone who has no clue about how the process would work manually, and is equally unable to figure out how the computer should then simulate it. Back when I was hired in as a manager for Circuit City, I'd perform the register balancing, and make the deposits. For checks, that originally meant verifying the amounts and check numbers on a screen for each register, and adding in missing checks (usually traveller's checks). Someone at Corporate decided to automate this process, and had the programmers change this. The programmers gave us a system which originally choked if two checks on the same register were for the same amount (very common on new release days for CDs and movies). That was fixed, but they made the assumption that every check number would be unique (not guaranteed--especially with newer accounts). They finally got it right, but it took months. 

 

More recently, I ran into an error much like Lawnmower Boy's contact lense solution problem. Every few months, I place an order online with Petco for 4 cases of 24 cans of a certain flavor of Fancy Feast cat food to be shipped to my Mom. I've been doing this for several years now, as the local supermarket only receives a few cans of the one flavor that her cat will eat, and is frequently sold out. Petco's site has a way to "quick order" what you did on the last order, which, up until the last time,worked very well. This time, however, instead of 4 cases of 24 cans, Petco's upgraded ordering system decided to convert that to 96 cases, and "helpfully" offered to put the $1700+ of cat food into my cart. I really can't imagine what would have happened if I had used their automatic shipment plan.

[Old Man]

Until last summer our timesheet software didn't do math correctly, and we only got rid of the Y2K bugs in October. But my favorite software engineering story is the one about the Therac 25.

[Cancer]

In a separate complaint...

 

Let's hear it for IT support, 24/7! 24 days a month, 7 weeks a quarter!

 

Idiots.

[Old Man]

I wonder what they pay people in your IT support department.

[Cancer]

Since it's contracted out, that's not knowable. Short of finding one of them and asking.

[Old Man]

it's contracted out

I found the problem.

[Burrito Boy]

My condolences to those who have lost loved ones.

 

I always feel guilty about griping when other people have real problems but...

 

I just lost twenty dollars at the store. It must have fallen out of my pocket when I pulled out my phone. That was the money I was going to use to buy my ticket to see BOC.

[gewing]

Now hear this: You are responsible for knowing how to use your tools.

 

In this case, students in my physics class, the tool in question is those lame-a$$ TI calculators that REQUIRE YOU TO USE PARENTHESES PROPERLY. But for the overwhelming pressure from a previous generation of marketing weenies, mathophobes explicitly including the education colleges in toto, and inertial laziness in general, you would not have to suffer the self-inflicted wounds of hardware that was intentionally designed to do the Wrong Thing.

 

There are many, many physics equations that involve fractions like 1/(2 pi) and 1/(4 pi). The physics is not going to change.

 

I see many, many cases of homework and exam answers involving these equations computed using the aforementioned booby traps where the answers are wrong by almost, but not quite, a factor of 10. THESE ARE YOUR FAULT. The not-quite-factor-of-ten is, more precisely and quite repeatedly, a factor of 9.8696....

 

Recognize it? That's a factor of pi squared. Where does it come from? BECAUSE YOU CLODS FORGET THE PARENTHESES and instead of multiplying by 1/(4 pi), you have multiplied by a factor of (1 / 4 * pi). Those are different by that factor of pi^2.

 

So, if you persist in using a well-known-to-be-broken tool like an algebraic calculator, then you deserve all the self-inflicted stabs in the eye with a broken stick that you get.

 

Because this RPN-using old man will point, mark down, and laugh at you.

I hate RPN, and don't remember any problems with my TI way back when, it showed you exactly what you were doing, you just made sure you had the right number of parentheses...    If I recall correctly, of course...