Been a while since I checked in.
I've been lurching between temp jobs for the last few months. Most recently I spent some time working at Nottingham City Criminal Justice Intervention Team, which sounds like a team of superheros, transferring data from their old, perfectly good database (DIRWeb) onto their new, hopeless piece of garbage called Bomic. Bomic is... well, here are the three most grievous of the two or three dozen issues I found.
- The fields in the database system appear in a completely different order and arrangement from how they appear on the forms I was typing in, making the whole data entry process unnecessarily convoluted and slow.
- Your password can be as short as 1 character, is NOT case-sensitive, and CANNOT contain numbers or symbol characters.
- The names of every user are displayed right there in a dropdown on the login screen - even if you DON'T manage to log in.
After bringing up some of these issues with my line manager he asked me to compile a report on the subject, and I took great pleasure in doing so. It's a horrible piece of software. And - this is the insane bit - this is the piece of software the Probation Service is moving to. This is the new deal and it looks like - just don't get me started on the interface. It looks like it should be running on Windows 3.11.
So the work was frustrating. The people, on the other hand, were great! To begin with, I had a desk in the main office - the staff at CJIT are mainly keyworkers who work with drug users (although the office is purely admin, the workers go to the "clients"), so they all have wonderful personalities. But at the instant I finished the database transferral I had been originally hired for (the number of holes in the data was unbelievable), one of the temps in the admin department quit so I stepped smartly into her role - and the admin department, to be honest, is dull as dishwater. Very similar, dull work - only no conversation. I had the option of staying for several more weeks after when I did quit (Friday 28th) but quite frankly I had to get out of there. I didn't want to stay on permanently, no thanks. I had strong premonitions that they were ultimately going to lose their battle with Bomic and I dearly wanted to bail out.
I have more temp work starting on Tuesday so I'm fine, work-wise. As for more permanent stuff - I've become terrifyingly relaxed and need to kick myself back into gear as far as finding permanent work is concerned. Yes indeed.
I would KILL for a neck rub right now.
