... I hate it when you invent the wheel and somebody has to come along and reinvent it, only not nearly as good as the original.
Where I work we have this problem quite often. We are given systems to use, then they take them away and replace them with something else. The problem with this is that we don't always get to take the data with us. We have to recreate the wheel. Again. Now this has happened with something that really pisses me off.
For the past three years I have developed a system that we use in our office only for doing all the things that the home office has failed to provide. And they are plenty. The biggest component to this system is a way to create, organize, and update certificates of insurance. We currently have over 2600 current certificates of insurance in our system. Which means if you need to find one you need the tools to search for it. One client in particular has over 450 certificates of insurance every year. And they update about 300 of them on their renewals. Since I'm the one responsible for issuing these certificates of insurance, I made sure that the system we use does them in the most efficient manner possible. And it took me three years to get it to work this way. Now, along comes the home office, all pissy because it's something that they don't control nor do they own to tear it apart and make it work like shit. Well, actually they did do this and that is exactly what has happened. It doesn't work or flow the way the original one did. But, they are going to make us start using this system anyway. Which means that my job is now going to take me a lot longer to do since I will, again, no longer have all the tools I need at my disposal. Of course, the person in the home office who is redesigning what I've already done isn't somebody who actually uses the system so why should he give a fuck how well it works? It's just another thing he needs to get off his desk.
I understand it from a home office perspective. I spent 15 years of my life working in corporate IT departments and this is the number one reason why I no longer work in corporate IT departments. The undeniably lame egos those geeky bastards display. No matter what it is, they can do it better. Except find their dicks without a map. Now I have to spend next Thursday in a fucking conference call telling them why their system blows. I'll inevitably tell them that, yes, we need to do full text searching and they'll tell me, no, you don't. Not with the benefit of actually having to do my job, mind you. My life is hell somedays.
