Futility in the Modern Era

[missroserose]

So it's officially been one year and four months since BD set me to separating out the long distance billing by hand, and since then I've been continually promised that we're going to find some sort of automation for it. Although BD and Brian have recently bought a call accounting system, our company's apparent curse to only buy nonfunctional bug-riddled beta software is still in full swing, and the developers (who live in India) have yet to get back to us on why it quit working after three days. And I'm still doing it by hand.

...I'm seriously tempted to create, perform, record and YouTube a dance piece: The Despair of the Administrative Assistant Upon Learning of the Futility of Hope for an End to the Long Distance Billing in the Modern Era.

Comments

[decibel45.livejournal.com]

Have you looked at using Access for this?

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Had I [a] a copy of the program and [b] the first idea how to use it, I might have done so. Unfortunately, neither are present, and BD doesn't seem to think it's the right way to go about it (I've asked), so I'm stuck doing it like this for now.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

if you feel like custom-creating an Access database, maintaining it, upgrading it for compatibility with new version releases, and ensuring the data migrates with each upgrade properly, it's actually a viable solution IIRC.

Then again, investing the effort needed to generate that skillset and the time before you actually have it down enough to be 100% practical probably mean you aren't that bad off doing it by hand. That, and once you've developed that skillset you'll probably be billing much more per hour than you are now, and BD probably likes his current secretary.