I’m encountering the exact same thing. I have a grant, and there’s a supply budget. Just supplies. Whatever supplies. The university codes every type of supply as different. Computers, power cords, storage, etc. And they say it like it’s a point of pride! “We keep more detailed records than any agency!”
Which means I need to go back and recode expenses into different funds. With the time I should be doing to work I got the grant to do.
It’s not the end of the world. But WTF. Why are we collecting data, at the expense of my time, that nobody needs or will ask for???
It’s not even that. As I said, the layers preventing me from screwing my stuff up, or preventing me from screwing everyone else’s stuff up, I have no objection to. The part that shifts a rounding error’s worth of funding from this agency to that agency, or from this team within my agency to that team, when the actual amount of funding doesn’t change at all anywhere because we have a certain number of FTEs and that’s the actual determining factor of how much my team costs the agency…
" the University requires us to be specific to benefit Financial Reporting. It helps them to get a clear picture of where money is being spent or not spent."
WHY DO YOU CARE? It’s my grant! Will this mean an increase in available funds for faculty? No? Then this is not worth my time to do. Gah.
As one trundles down the path to ITSM enlightenment, one must stop and smell the project management.
I’m trying to play by the rules. The layers of crap that keep being placed in my way are inordinate lately.
I’ve told my director that as long as “Begging Forgiveness” is one hundred fold easier than “Asking Permission”… It doesn’t make sense to waste my time on project requests.
Ugh! That is so frustrating. I’ve come to believe that it’s just the way managers are taught - they need that to try to fit estimates together like puzzle pieces into the timeframes allotted because it’s easier than actually deciding what the real priorities are.
But good luck if you try to bounce it back as “Just give me the priorities and a timeframe and I’ll address them as well as I can within that timeframe.”
There’s nothing wrong with talking to yourself.
There’s nothing wrong with answering yourself.
There’s even nothing wrong with talking to walls.
It’s when the walls start answering that you have a problem.
The taxes, I don’t think they can help; most jurisdictions require that taxes be listed separately from the base charge.
The rest of it, yes, that’s borderline fraudulent (especially if they’ve “guaranteed” you a particular rate, and then get around that guarantee by raising the fees instead of the base rate).
These wordlists break search tools. And many wordlists are spammed to important sites like archive.org, github, etc. which it may not be practical to block.
I’ve always been comforted by the idea of hunting down some particularly bad one of these dipshit scam artists who think it’s a cute innovation to put a dictionary into search-string metadata, hunting them down like Batman…
As you do…
And visiting horrific and on-the-nose violence upon themeir sense of well being. Bless their hearts.
After I’ve chopped them to death in my head with a vorpal hockey-stick of extra-tenderization, I’m content to put spammerscammers on a mental list. A list of what I don’t actually know. It depends on how desperate things are during the next moment we manage to bring these fuckers back down to touch ground level.
Well, sacrificing the premium channels, which I find that I rarely watch anymore, and paring out of some of the basic cable channels, I still couldn’t get the monthly fee below $150. But getting rid of the landline phone brought it down closer to $100. So I am pleased. I thought bundling cable, internet, and phone was supposed to be cheaper in the long run, but apparently not. I’ll be looking into a voip service to replace it, since my wife refuses to use just our cell phones for phone calls.
