Wednesday, August 30, 2006
It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it
I work for a property management company. We rent out spaces. We deal in commercial and residential units for the majority of our operations. Our single biggest department, number of employees-wise, is maintenance. They deal with every complaint from leaky toilets, long grass, to “odd smells”.
This isn’t about them though, it’s about me.
The department uses an archaic Lotus Approach database for all their work order and time sheet needs. This same database is later exported into our accounting system for payroll. It’s also used for all the reporting to individual projects.
It’s the slowest piece of garbage ever. The database itself is homegrown. Read that as designed by someone that doesn’t really understand what an index is. OR why there should be separate tables for specific things, instead of just random extra databases. Granted, the guy that wrote it did a damn fine job, given the circumstances. It works, albeit slowly, for everything they want it to do. Most of the time.
Every 2 weeks, we get a constant stream of complaints about the speed. Almost 2 years ago, we contracted with a company to rewrite the application, using a Web front end (most likely ASP) and a SQL back-end. This company specializes in exactly this sort of custom application building. They haven’t even started on it.
I think I could hammer something out for in, given a month to work. And it looks more and more like I’m going to have to do that. I don’t want to do that, at all. I know how much time it will consume, and how much of a headache I’ll get just writing it. Then we’ll have to support our users, and train them all up on the new way to do things. Just thinking about it makes me anxietous. That should really be a word.
And to top it all off, my video card crapped out, and the new one I ordered is on back-order. Maybe it’s time to sneak in an order of a couple workstation PCs for the IT department.
Currently Listening:
Artist: Gordon Lightfoot
Album: The Complete Greatest Hits
Year: 2002