About a year and a half ago, I had an absolutely miserable experience. A student and I were going to the American Arachnology Society conference at Cornell University; we paid up the conference fees, made a lovely poster, booked our flights, and traipsed down to the Minneapolis airport…where we sat for two days, watching our flight get delayed and delayed, and eventually, finally, they gave up and told us that our flights were cancelled, we should go home.
That was terrible enough.
All this was paid through university travel funds, and I did all the responsible stuff of getting our registration fees reimbursed (I thought), and while we were miserable and disappointed, we were done. Except…my nightmare had only just begun.
You see, all travel expenses at my university go through some accounting software called Chrome River. We didn’t go? We spent less than we’d told it we were going to? Some of the planned expenses were bouncing back with reimbursements? Total shit fit. I’ve been dealing with its conniptions ever since, getting cryptic demands and threats by email.
What totally threw the software was a) Cornell said we were getting reimbursed, but we didn’t, and I only just got a check for the registration fees this week, and b) the rotten airline did not reimburse us at all, but instead billed the university for $60 for flight cancellation. That’s right, they cancelled the flights, but we got charged extra for the inconvenience.
Chrome River has been dunning me, personally, for the money for the past year. If I didn’t cough up something in the next few days, I was going to be held responsible for spending less money than we had planned, and was going to have to pay up or else. All year long, I’ve been getting these horribly opaque machine-generated emails from some evil accounting software.
Well, I think I’ve finally jumped through all the flaming hoops they’ve demanded of me, getting all the ridiculous paperwork filled out and filed today. I’m done.
Except…I’m told that tomorrow I have to log on to Chrome River and press three buttons to finalize everything. I’m terrified. I’ve seen how Chrome River reacts to tiny deviations from its required protocol. What if I press the wrong button, or press them in the wrong order, or fail to show the proper respect while following its demands? This hell might go on even longer.
I think I might have to retire sooner than expected just to avoid dealing with Chrome River ever again.
But think of the money it is saving!
(Because your time in dealing with the software is not accounted for by the accounting software.)
“What if I press the wrong button, or press them in the wrong order?”
Sounds like something out of this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WireDilemma
A long time ago (in the infancy of computers being used for routine bookkeeping, email, and so on) I read a SF story which starts with the main character writing a complaint to the vendor of a defective product he’d purchased. Somehow or other, computer systems keep misinterpreting his and others’ communications (the story is told by way of emails among the various parties), the whole thing snowballs, and the guy winds up on death row for the murder of a child (there was in fact no dead child). Even the governor’s emergency pardon is also blocked by a computer, because reasons. It was meant as an absurdly comedic piece — and yet, here we are. We’ve now got people being arrested because of faulty face recognition software, I suppose it’s only a matter of time….
The worst part and major part of the cause of these situations is that decisions about them are made by people who never have to live with the consequences. Marketing staff sells middle and higher managment on how slick their system is compared to the alternatives, but the upper management never has to live with the reality of the system. Furthermore, those higher-ups now have a big reason to deny and supress the problems: their name is attached to the decision to adopt the system, and claiming it has been flawless and amazing is what gets them their next promotion, despite the complete lack of reality in that statement.
I’ve got an accounting/billing nightmare going on with a medical provider. For some reason the medical provider decided to bill Medicare as my primary insurance rather than the insurance from my job. Medicare denies their claims, and my primary job-provided insurance can’t pay because the claims say Medicare is the primary and denied payment. I think “cluster fuck” is the appropriate phrase used to describe these situations.
You realize if you do that, the developers of the software get a bonus from the university admins?
Our company uses Chrome River, it maybe the single worst piece of software I have ever dealt with. It got to the point where staff would just send all of their receipts to the CR “specialist” in Finance, and let them fill in the forms.
Sounds like a really shitty software product. And maybe either the accounting higher-ups aren’t bothering to actively vet and correct the system’s decisions like they should, or the system doesn’t allow management override. So the program follows all the relevant accounting rules as the programmer(s) understood them, and they didn’t allow any flexibility or override, because rules are rules.
robro@5 — Without knowing the details of your case but having seen the Australian health system at work, I would suggest that the insurer is exploiting a minor processing error to avoid/delay paying out the claim. If the insurer continues to play obstructive games, you can lodge a complaint with your state’s health ombudsman. Sometimes all it takes is threatening to do so.
Raging Bee@8 —
I think the higher-ups are completely aware of the shittiness of their accounting software and have implemented it to make it easier to commit wage theft. Cynical, I know, but it’s the only explanation the fits my experience working in the university sector in Australia.
“Single worst piece of software I have ever dealt with”?
So… you haven’t encountered Horizon ?
“The final cost of compensation is expected to exceed £1 billion”
If we’re mounting a competition for Worst Client Service Software Ever, a lot of Canadian civil servants would vote for the Phoenix payroll system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
Also, I now realize my @3 conflates two different stories along the same line. One is “Computers Don’t Argue” [Dickinson, 1965], and another one, the author of which I have forgotten. The only thing I recall about the other one is that the defective product was called a “zygomat”. (Which I later learned is actually a facial bone. I slightly fractured mine a few months ago.) Perhaps that will trigger a memory in some nerd here present.
richardh@11,
Yes, I was going to mention that. Many of the victims of the scandal – subpostmasters and -mistresses – spent time in prison for crimes they had not committed, due to Fujitsu’s crap accounting software. So far, none of the guilty – the Post Office management who continued to persecute their victims on false charges, and order their lawyers to make statements in court that they knew to be false, for years after it was clear the Horizon software was faulty – have been so much as charged. Up to now at least, faulty software needs the cooperation of incompetent andor malevolent management to cause real damage.