Re: Colour me square
So many times, this sort of crap.
When I started out I was doing temp admin crap that involved keying in account card numbers from a box of plastic 'credit' cards and checking the name on the account matched the name on the card. So, something like 16 digits, confirm, read name, quit out of record, repeat. If it doesn't match, pull the card from the box, put it to one side and carry on with the next card. cards in ascending numerical order (Lunn validation). Both I and my colleague cobbled together terminal macros that did "quit, increment last number, confirm", and then we'd read the account name to check the match. 7+ hours a day.
We got through the boxes way faster than they were expecting and didn't believe we'd checked them all until we demonstrated what we'd done. Then we got bollocked for not following their instructions exactly...
Another instance from about 11 years ago, I was seconded from development to the systems admin team to cover for staff shortage (long story). Part of the roll first thing every morning was to check that a set of jobs had run successfully on the server. They did this by manually reviewing the scheduler database and ticking the entries on a sheet for every job successfully run each day. Took about 30-45 minutes most days.
I built a version of the tick sheet in excel, set it to connect to the scheduler database and match job names pulling back the job status for the current run date, then populate the next column with a tick where the job ran successfully. Took less than 5 minutes to open excel, run query, check the right jobs were all ticked, print it, walk to the printer, walk to the hole punch, walk to the shelf with the binder and file the report. The manager lost his mind 'cos how could that be a proper check? Thus demonstrating his effective ignorance of how any of the technology his team controlled actually worked...