Computer programs I violently hate

I've been having some technical problems at work this week, and they have been filling me with violent rage (as so many things do, it seems). So instead of writing some happy horseshit about flowers and butterflies like I usually do, I'm going to bitch about these particular computer programs that I'm pretty sure were designed by Satan to infuriate people to the point where they just kill themselves and join him in Hell. If you're not familiar with any of these, don't worry -- I'll explain them and then you'll know to be on the lookout if your boss is ever like "oh hey how about we try using ______ program instead?" and you can start shrieking and run out of the room. And maybe jump out a window, if you're feeling particularly dramatic.

1

Internet Explorer

I'm not going to rant at length about this one because I don't really have anything new to add. I used Internet Explorer for years and years and years, even though people constantly bitched about it, because computer nerds constantly bitch about everything. Just like I'm not going to buy a f**king $2500 Mac laptop just because you think it's the greatest thing ever, I'm also not going to install and learn to use a new browser just because YOU hate Internet Explorer. It had never done anything to wrong me, so who exactly gave a f**k what browser I used?! I mean, how can one browser be 'better' than another, anyway? Does it let you look at the Internet? Then it's fine.

But then Internet Explorer started to piss me off when it wouldn't properly display my image uploader for this blog. And f**king with my blog is unforgivable  So I downloaded Firefox instead, but that was all glitchy and weird and pissed me off within a week, so then I downloaded Chrome and it is the shiznit. I love Chrome. It's super awesome and easy to use and best of all, since you log into it with your gmail account, it remembers your history and favorites and crap on whatever computer you use. Pretty convenient.

But, in order to use this one program for work (which will be discussed next), I HAVE to use Internet Explorer. There is no other way. This program will not run on Chrome or Firefox for some reason. Because it's a picky little bitch. So guess what -- this week my computer updated to IE 10, and because IE 10 is so fantastic (sarcasm alert), and because this f**king program is such a picky little bitch, it stopped working. It stopped working so hard I had to call my IS department. And I hate calling my IS department.

So, f**k you, Internet Explorer.

But IE was really only part of the problem here. The real asshole in the room is my old pal ...

2

Citrix

If you're not familiar with Citrix, then turn your head to skyward and give thanks. You don't have any idea how lucky you are.

Citrix is a web-based program that allows you to remotely log in to company servers. So, like, if your company has an intranet in their headquarters where all employees save shared files and all emails travel and so on, Citrix will let you log into that intranet from outside the building. Fantastic! What a great invention!

Here are all the f**ked up terrible things that make me wish Citrix was a person so I could beat it up and throw it under a bus:

-- Logging into it is such a pain in the ass, you'd think it was the f**king NSA. You have to be Tom Cruise dangling from the goddamned ceiling just to access a bloody Word document that you wrote.

No seriously -- in order to log in, I was given a little keychain thing with a set of digital numbers on it. The set of number changes roughly every one minute, and you have to enter the correct currently-displaying numbers to log in. Well, technically, you have to use a personal code that you provided, plus the set of constantly-changing numbers, plus another password (which must be changed monthly). Okay seriously? It's my goddamned email. I don't deal in Swiss bank accounts and government secrets. If it were up to me, my password would be "PASSWORD." But of course, that's not allowed, since your password must contain a mix of uppercase, lowercase, numbers, Chinese characters, and foreign punctuation. And I have to go through this whole rigmarole every time I need to do pretty much anything. Oh, and also ...

-- It logs you out roughly every five minutes.

So you get to log back in, of course.

Which I love.

-- Once you're logged in, you get the pleasure of using Office 2003. This means that my Citrix-based version of MS Office is not compatible with anything that anyone sends me, ever. Because nobody uses Office 2003 anymore. Can you even still buy it? I'm not sure. But I'm still using it, like a f**king moron. I can't click links in emails, because it will try to open Internet Explorer 2003 and this will immediately cause everything to crash. Instead, I have to carefully copy links and then paste them into IE 10, which usually works. Like, 80% of the time. 20% of the time I just can't read links. I'm sure they weren't important.

-- My hard drive cannot communicate with Citrix. They hate each other. So documents HAVE to be created within Citrix (on good ol' Office 2003, of course) or I can't save them to the intranet or send them to my coworkers. The only way around this was to sign up for another gmail account which I use to email things to myself. 

So let's say I have to download a report from a database online. I download the report, save it to my computer's hard drive, then email it from my gmail account to my work account, then open it within my work account (through Citrix), then save it to the intranet, and only THEN can I send the report to the coworker who asked for it.

So you see why I got really upset when a coworker visited Florida and said she saw the Citrix headquarters but didn't firebomb it for me. She should have. F**k those guys.

3

ADP e-Time

Goddamned motherf**king piece of shit e-Time. I swear in the name of all that is holy -- e-Time WAS built by the Devil himself.

Do you use e-Time to fill our your timecards at work? You probably do -- damn near everyone does. So this particular rant may hit home with you.

e-Time is a c**t. For starters, the password situation: you have to change your password roughly every fifteen seconds, but you can't use the same password twice. What I always do is use the same password and just change the number on the end whenever it demands ... and I made it up to password version 30 before enough time had gone by for me to go back to 1. Yes, over the course of a few months, I was able to go through THIRTY PASSWORDS. Once again, this isn't exactly Top Secret government shit here. It's my goddamned timecard, where I put in my vacation days and doctors appointments.

Holy shit you guys ... has there been a Tom Clancy novel turned Harrison Ford movie about this particular caper yet? Because ... whoa.

It also crashes all the f**king time. This was the worst when I was an intern at a major corporation years ago. I was paid hourly, and I rode the bus to and from work so I could never 100% guarantee what time I would actually get there. And I absolutely had to be out the door by 4:58PM or I'd miss my bus home. But e-Time ... ahh. I would arrive in the morning at, say, 7:56AM and go to clock in, but e-Time would crash. By the time the computer was restarted (yeah, it crashed so hard I had to actually restart the entire computer), several minutes had passed, so now it would appear that by clocking out at 4:58PM, I had not actually been there for a full 8 hours. Because of e-Time.

It crashed when my coworkers and I returned from lunch almost every day, so my boss would have to manually go in and override my time card so that it didn't appear I was taking lunches longer than an hour. I'm sure my boss had nothing better to do.

Now I'm salaried, but e-Time still crashes constantly, requiring me to restart my browser and sometimes (when I'm really lucky), my entire computer. I have tried multiple times to log in and approve my timecard when I'm home sick or on vacation or something, and it always fails so I just end up giving one of my coworkers my password and asking them to do it for me. TOTALLY SECURE.

It supposedly has a function where you can request time off directly to your boss through e-Time, but we were told not to use it because it "constantly malfunctions" so our bosses would never see the request. My vacation accruals weren't working right and it took hours of Payroll's time to correct the problem. One of my coworkers is chronically unable to keep track of which of his 65 passwords is currently active, requiring him to call Payroll weekly after he gets locked out of the program.

But yeah, total time-saver.

F**king e-Time.

This isn't even close to satisfying me.

Better.

Okay, I feel better now after bitching about these terrible, awful, no-good, very bad programs. Now if I could just convince my employers to change to something else ...

haha, just kidding. my employers fear change. But that's okay; I still like them :-)