GRIPES

[Marty_d]

2 hours ago, Yenn said:

It is what you get used to. I am cold here in Qld today. The temp hasn't got above 21 degrees and I am just frozen.

All winter we have had forecasts higher than achieved temperatures and actual weather more like Victorias. I just want that clear blue winter sky all day.

21 is perfect weather.  Shorts and t-shirt.

[nomadpete]

That suits me, Bruce.

I was born in Sydney.

After surviving adolescence, I took a critical look at the place and decided that Sydney was too dirty, too noisy, and too crowded. That was in 1976.

So I left. I arrived in Brisbane, on a Sunday morning. The first thing I noticed was that there wasn't any traffic. And all the traffic lights were flashing amber. They used to go around on Saturday night and manually switch them off - everyone went to bed by nine o'clock, even on Saturday night!

That was good enough for me. I discovered that people left keys in their cars and didn't lock their doors at night. It was just a big, sleepy country town. All my Sydney mates kept telling me "Queensland? Turn the clock back ten years". They were right, but it suited me just fine.

 

I stayed for 30 years. When the kids left home I noticed that Brisbane had become too noisy, too dirty, and too crowded for me. Too much of my life was slipping by whilst I sat in daily traffic jams. Just like Sydney was in 1976.

And now it felt too hot as well.

 

So I drove up the hill to Toowoomba. There's a nice quiet country town. It was nice to slow down to the country pace. A bonus is that living 2400' above Brisbane gave relief from the heat, too.

 

Time passed and all too soon  I found myself sitting in congested traffic. I never thought it could happen in Toowoomba. And the weather felt warmer each year.........

 

What to do?

 

Tasmania was the answer.

Then unfortunately all the (other) mainlanders (we call them climate refugees) discovered the place.

 

Now I'm feeling it's a bit crowded.........

But at least it'll never be too hot!

 

Edited July 14, 2020 by nomadpete
corrected the autocorrect

[nomadpete]

Marty, get real...

In Tasmania, 21 degrees is a heatwave!

[old man emu]

On 14/07/2020 at 6:11 PM, nomadpete said:

But at least it'll never be too hot!

We'll see after Judgement Day.

[old man emu]

Who was the dumb B who thought that putting honey in a squeeze bottle was a good idea? It's highly viscous at lower temperatures and compressible, so after the bottle is half empty, it's damned near impossible to get the honey out without putting the bottle in the microwave. I don't mind a hot honey, but I don' like my honey hot.

[onetrack]

Put the honey container in a larger container of hot water, the temperature rise will be adequate to make the honey pour, without making it hot.

[nomadpete]

4 hours ago, old man emu said:

We'll see after Judgement Day.

Judgement day is when premier Gutwein tells us that the Victorians are still not welcome to bring that nasty virus to us.

[red750]

My gripe is with Centrelink and Mygov.

 

What a useless piece of garbage the MyGov website is. We decided my daughter should apply for the Carer's pension for looking after my wife, particularly since her thyroid cancer operation, but also her eyesight is bad, her writing is almost unreadable, and her arthritis makes getting around difficult. We downloaded the forms from the website - nine pages for each of us. Lots of arguments over the valuation of assets, etc, but got them completed. Scanned them into a .pdf to send off. My daughter gets on Mygov to complete the online application - the forms are not needed. She had to answer the same questions online. Three times she got part way through, reached a point where it said "Click to save and continue." The system froze. Rang the helpline - We can't help you, log off and start again.

 

My daughter turned 40 this year, she has lived in this house her whole life. A question asked "When did you start living at this address?" The answer box had 1998 already in it. She couldn't change it. They asked the date my wife travelled overseas. It was before we were married. She was in her twenties. What has that got to do with a carer's payment for a 76 year old pensioner? If they had said "Have you been overseas in the last five years?" it would make more sense.

 

You can't send Centrelink an email, you have to use their mobile app or Twitter. If the app is anything like their website I don't want anything to do with it. I don't have any apps on my phone. And I wouldn't put my personal business  on Twitter - I don't use Twitter. The other alternative is to line up with all the Jobseeker and Jobkeeper people at their office. Social Distancing?

 

 

 

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

OMFG! You can send them an email by Twitter. Has to break every electronic security rule in the book. You don't want to know the amount of money these dopes spend on what looks like  contractors to produce this carp.

 

When my father passed away, my brother and I went to Centrelink to stop his pension. The offices seemed almost as bad as the site you described: dysfunctional being sent from pillar to post and a lot of people who didn't know what to do.. .and you can't tell me they don't process the same thing day in day out. Centrelink is designed to make you feel inadequate, to try and dissuade you from applying for benefits and make it hard at every turn.. 

 

Maybe a chat to what used to be called the citizens advice bureau or a chat to the local federal MP? Not sure what good it would do...

Edited July 31, 2020 by Jerry_Atrick

[red750]

4 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

to try and dissuade you from applying for benefits

Exactly what my daughter said when she was battling with the site.

[old man emu]

Makes you wonder how the poorly educated and those for who English is a second or third language manage to navigate the system to get all the benefits available.

[onetrack]

Centrelink is no different from any other huge organisation that only functions to a basic degree, due to the brilliant efforts by a handful of dedicated and skilled employees.

 

What you must do, is when you find one of those helpful people, is get their name, and then ask for them by name, every time you need to deal with the organisation.

[willedoo]

3 hours ago, old man emu said:

Makes you wonder how the poorly educated and those for who English is a second or third language manage to navigate the system to get all the benefits available.

Maybe they use an advocate, similar to the service provided by the RSL for ex Diggers trying to access benefits through the Veteran's Affairs Department. Without advocates helping them, a lot of older veterans would have no chance of working through the mountain of paperwork.

[spacesailor]

The same with " older less educated people " trying to get a pilots licence, through all that beaurocracy that CASA and other s make, just to look busy! .

spacesailor

[kgwilson]

Centrelink and other Government departments have the worst web sites and on-line systems you can possibly have. The Public Service bought into one of the most expensive and inflexible ERP solutions (SAP) available. It is a German system and things must be done in a very structured way so customisations just don't work well if at all. The the Public Service employs IT people who can't get a job anywhere else to create on-line front end processes that end up being so flaky they rarely work all the time. I have MyGov with links to Centrelink, Medicare & Myhealth record. Each individual system is full of flaky software that fails often. The same comments apply to other systems I access such as the SES and Service NSW. All poorly structured & with plenty of bugs.

 

I was an IT professional for over 25 years and would have been sacked if I'd ever came up with anything like these State and Federal Government systems. I don't think they have ever heard of "User Acceptance Testing".

Edited August 1, 2020 by kgwilson

[old man emu]

The problem with the Public Service's IT people is that they are anonymous to the users of the systems they create. As KGW says, in the Private Sector, if you continued to make the screw ups that these IT people make you wouldn't last very long at all. The problem is that the Public Service hires on alleged "merit". Of two applicants for a position, the one with the higher level of course under the belt will get the job. It doesn't matter to the Public Service that the applicant has little experience in tailoring systems for those who don't live and breath programming and is unable to understand why the technically beautiful lot of coding they have come up with produces an impossible human/system interface.

 

My son tells me that any website and supporting e-Commerce stuff that he builds represents his professional portfolio, the same as photographs are a fashion model's portfolio used to get future work. He has had some ding-dong battles with clients who wanted to have a 2010 website in a 2020 e-Commerce world. Not only don't 2010 websites work in 2020, current users want a simple interface that didn't exist in 2010.

[red750]

One of the problems is that they expect you to think and answer the way they do - there is no flexibility. For example, they may ask a question for which you do not have an answer, like "What is your home phone number?" If you only have a mobile, and leave the answer blank because you entered your mobile number at the appropriate question, at the bottom of the page when you try to save it, the system will hang without explanation. Most of these idiots are young people who don't realise that older people aren't up with the latest. Just like places that expect you to have a tap and go card, when you still use a passbook account. Or expect everyone to have smartphones loaded with apps.I'm not saying that is me, but there are many older than me who are in that situation. I certainly do not have the internet turned on on my phone, and I don't have any apps on it. My basic (read 'cheap') mobile plan does not include those features. Seniors should not be forced to toe the line.

[Yenn]

I don't have apps and I don't have a plan. my wife and I share a basic mobile phone for when we are away from home. Our landline has not worked for about a week and is supposedly being fixed next tuesday, so telstra are diverting calls to our mobile. Not much good as our mobile reception at home is very poor. We have to leave the house and walk 50m up the hill for anyone to hear us speak.

Luckily we could I suppose use skype, if we set it up as our internet connection is by satellite.

[nomadpete]

I am amazed that just about every government agency uses SAP.

I'm no IT guru, but I gather that SAP is a very powerful, very versatile platform. But it takes a capable expert to develop an adaptation to suit a particular application. And there's no guarantee that any application will be able to interface with any other department's application because each department has a different development mob, with different abilities.

But they keep on using it.

And keep on spending bucket loads of cash training users to find workarounds for the bugs. Instead of creating intuitive user interfaces.

 

PS, I've used SAP in past employment. In my experience, it was full of 'hidden features' - traps and bugs.

Edited August 1, 2020 by nomadpete

[pmccarthy]

SAP is a con, I have seen it bring down companies.

[nomadpete]

I suspect that Qld Health used SAP for their payroll debacle. That nearly brought down the State government.

 

My employer used SAP for our payroll, and for purchasing and for stock control. Ours worked but had it's share of quirks. But Qld Health had their own IT people (contractors?).

Edited August 1, 2020 by nomadpete

[old man emu]

I thought we had agreed not to use abbreviations for airports. Now can we stop using abbreviations that are industry specific jargon. I feel like a sap  who's been struck by a sap, because I don't know what SAP is. 

[willedoo]

1 hour ago, old man emu said:

I thought we had agreed not to use abbreviations for airports. Now can we stop using abbreviations that are industry specific jargon. I feel like a sap  who's been struck by a sap, because I don't know what SAP is. 

SAP was a poison they used to poison crows back in the 60's.

[nomadpete]

Sorry, but I don't know the words that SAP stand for.

 

The SAP I'm referring to is a German relational database programme for computers. The Australian government purchased a version of it many years ago. It can be modified to do everything from accounting and payroll, to stock control, purchasing, and everything that a business needs. 

 

In the true form of misguided government brainfarts, the implementation of SAP was an award winning project, in spite over being over budget and behind time. All the problems were assumed to be all 'our fault'.

 

I have no idea which mob first implemented SAP but they must have been important because other government departments soon followed their lead. They started buying the same system. Since actually using SAP was plagued by problems, many many job descriptions demanded that applicants must be familiar with use of SAP. This is because it takes a long time to learn how to work around its idiosyncracies.

 

Ultimately, all levels of government and GOC's (Government Owned Corporation) are now hampered by this computerised incompetance. The only winners are IT people who how how it works. They will always have ongoing contracts.

[old man emu]

SAP SE  sometimes known by its full name Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing, is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. The company is especially known for its ERP software.

 

RP provides an integrated and continuously updated view of core business processes using common databases maintained by a database management system. ERP systems track business resources—cash, raw materials, production capacity—and the status of business commitments: orders, purchase orders, and payroll. The applications that make up the system share data across various departments (manufacturing, purchasing, sales, accounting, etc.) that provide the data. ERP facilitates information flow between all business functions and manages connections to outside stakeholders.

 

Now we know.