Tuesday, October 07, 2014

How to Make Bad Data & Waste My Time

Keep sending the wrong file and by the way, keep opening and saving it in Excel so the numbers get corrupted. Then I can start working on it and realize I can’t get accurate data from it and so stop and ask for new files which will likely be bad too. Then make sure to deny you opened it in Excel. Then later, tell me you can’t open tab files on your computer so I can tell you to stop opening the files and just send them to me the way the vendor intended them to be. Then send me nine more emails with the last one being “when will it be ready?” Because if I get a lot of “are we there yet?” emails, it always SPEEDS up the process because answering garbage is a good use of my time. Oh yeah, then tell me something can’t be seen in the database that doesn’t actually exist—so that I can wade back through the data to tell you something you should already know about your own data. Then make sure to put the ID numbers in the wrong column in your system and then tell me they aren’t showing up in our system. Then give two people the same ID number and tell me my stuff is broken. Then after that, make a really crappy custom report and ask me why it doesn’t work. Then you should send me the same data in 16 different files in 4 formats and act like it is 23 unique files.

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