This is a rant.

It has no redeeming social values, no funny stories, no attempts to be insightful, none of that. It is purely and simply a rant, because I am pissed off. At myself, mostly, but because I can’t admit that its me, I have to be pissed off at something else. And so --

Why is it so incredibly hard to get useful software? Is it me? Is this one of those Taxi Driver comments, where I am saying Is it me? Is it ME? It MUST be me, because there’s nobody else here. So, is it me? Am I just expecting too damn much? (A faint voice answers. I ignore it.) Is it that there is so much free stuff, so much incredible stuff available for a cheap price that I have grown totally unaware of just how complex this stuff is, how locked in a design is so that even if it WAS possible to make something smoother, easier, by the time the product actually gets out the door, trailing bugs and bug fixes, the LAST thing that anyone wants to do is make it EASIER?

Cripes.

Last night I got this Bright Idea. I am looking at a problem -- well, that’s part of it. See, Looking at Problems is not my job. Its something I like to do. I’m not all that great at it, but the nice part is, very few people even like to do it, so its not that hard to be better than most people. But its Not My Job. Its what I like to do, what I want to do, what I used to do when I worked where I used to work before I took their early retirement package, but it Isn’t what I do now, and if you aren’t convinced of that, I have a manager who would be glad to tell you. He’s a nice guy, he really is, and in a managerial environment where most managers are dogmatic as all get out, he’s really a good guy. But he’s also a Company guy, and so when he says I know you like to do that, Bill, but THIS is your job, he’s saying So KNOCK IT OFF!

Anyway.

I was looking at this problem, when I thought that it would be nice to get the numbers into Excel and mess around with them a bit. Now, I like Excel. I’m not an Excel wizard, but I can do a couple of things. So I took the numbers, got them downloaded to the PC, read in the file, dorked around a bit, and hey voila, theres a graph. Which told me a couple of things I didn’t know.

About seventy rows of data, three columns wide plus the time. Ok, worth the time.

Okay. So now I say Gee (this is where I should have had someone hit me on the head with a rock), if ONE days data was fun to look at, then getting it for SEVEN days would be even more fun. So I run the job to create the numbers, up on the mainframe, and then I get the reports and I run the Rexx exec to scan the output and create a little bitty extract, download it, open up the spreadsheet.

One download for each day.

And for the next hour, I open up each download, strip off the rows I don’t need, strip off the columns I don’t need, sort it, stick identifying titles on the tops of the columns, cut and paste it into the original spreadsheet, plot the whole damn thing, and look at it. to make sure it fits right.

And it tells me one or two more things. Not seven thousand, not seven. One or two. It would have been worth about ten minutes of my time. Not a whole Damned hour.

Nobody made me. Nobody asked me. And you know what my manager would have said. No ones gonna thank me for the time, where I work most of the people don't even like this stuff, and they don't ask me because they have this OTHER person who says he knows how to do this stuff, though he doesn't really -- like a stopped watch, he's right about twice a day -- so why in the hell did I do it?

Cause I thought it’d be fun. And it WAS fun. But not TONS of fun. If I could have just dumped the data into the Datamatic, said Hey, see this? Take these numbers and do the same thing, it would have been about right. But I couldn’t, because the software, slick as it is, doesn’t Work That Way.

So I wasted a bunch of time doing something nobody cares about but me.

Dammit. And other words I won't say. But I'll think 'em.

I know, I know. Poor little me, whimpering in the corner.

But Dammit......