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.