craigmcn

Okay, I like to whine; that’s what half of my blogs are about. But I hope I keep my whining realistic and pragmatic, rather than simply gratuitous. The women I work with (sorry, yes, they’re all women; 4 of them) seem to get off on whining about anything and everything. We had a significant system challenge the other day, “What are they doing about it?” “They’re trying to determine what happened and resolve the problem.” “What do we tell people who call?” “The technology group is trying to determine the problem and will resolve it as soon as possible.” “When is it going to be fixed?” “The technology group is trying to determine the problem and will resolve it as soon as possible.” “What can people do in the meantime?” “The technology group is trying to determine the problem and will resolve it as soon as possible.” (I think you see where I’m going with this.) And now this morning, one of them is whining that (without talking to any affected user) the problem isn’t solved. “The status should be Active and it shows In Progress. The user wouldn’t have re-started the application.” Yeah? You know that for a fact? The problem was solved Monday and the new status is as of Tuesday. It’s possible that the user has made changes. And since the user has not reported any new problems, what is there to investigate? I appreciate being thorough, but let’s be realistic at the same time.

Also this morning, one of them even began whining about the quality of gifts she can receive for having worked for the company for 35 years. Free stuff? You’re complaining about free stuff? Really? I mean, sure, for 35 years you think you might get something better than a sweatshirt or backpack with a corporate logo, but it’s $175 in merchandise from the catalogue. The catalogue has a bucketload of stuff that’s less than $10 and the majority is between $30 and $40. That’s a lot of gifts for $175. And some of the good stuff is leather coasters, etched vases and water pitchers and a bunch of golf paraphernalia. Whining about free stuff? Come on!