Whoops Sorry

If anyone is actually reading this, sorry I took such a long vacation. Just got caught up in a bunch of nothing. This will mostly be a rant onlong the lines of I hate my job.

Actually I don't hate my job, but some of the job related things are stupid.

Training for instance. It's boring and we don't really get trained on anything, its sole purpose seems to be if one of us screws up, the government can point to the training and say, we told him, it's his fault. None of it is designed to actually give us any useful tools to do our jobs, just to cover the state's hiny.

Well due to the horrible economy, the state did a buy out to encourage people to quit. It hit late last year, and in January, we found that despite hitting their quota or 2200 people, they still might need to lay off up to 2000 more. To help in figuring out who to lay off, the governor hired a specialist. Let that sink in. He hired an expert to help him figure out which people to get rid of because we can't afford to pay them. I wonder how much the specialist makes, and how many more $10 an hour state employees will have to lose their jobs to cover his salary?

Meanwhile, my department is not part of the hiring freeze. Since we deal with public security, we have permission to ask permission to fill vacancies. We currently have a few and one locat and another in the capital would be promotions for me and I am eligible and meet all requirements. There is only one problem. There is no mechanism for new applications or update to existing application. So there is no way to apply, period.

You see the state decided to improve its IT. Our department uses a very outdated and ancient piece of crap program to track our offenders and such. It has to be 20 years old if it's a day and that;s old for anything but ancient for software. They recently about 5 years ago, cobbled together a windows based un-user-friendly gui for it, but it's crap too. Now they pulled the fee payment system off that and went with a new internet accessible system that seems to be poorly designed and a major pain in the posterior. Then they bought a new system to track payroll, leave, worktime and business expenses. It mostly spends about as much time down or updating than it spends available for use. It also isn't very user friendly and seems to often mess up. This is the system that is supposed to let us update applications. There seems to have been a major issue getting it to speak to the internet based application system that a non-state employ would use to apply for a job. The new system being behind our firewall and not available outside the network. We also have a new internet based system to deal with offenders coming here from other states. So in addition to the 3 signons and passwords I originally had, one for assessing the network, one for internet assess to my work email and calendar, and one for the offender tracking system, now I have 3 entirely new sign ons and passwords. And none of these systems talk to one another. Yay fun. Weeeeeee. In the defense of the systems though, many of the employees here are so technologically challenged they are lucky to turn on the lights in there work area without help.