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This morning’s meeting with UM never happened.
He’s been in and out of the office, and is supposed to be out all afternoon.
John’s busy doing monitorings, so he’s unavailable too.
I went to UM’s office at around noon to see if there was any news, but there was none, and he sent a message to his boss, and said he’d come to my cube and let me know if anything comes up.
I didn’t think it would have been a really good idea to go back there and start trying to lay down the law without listening to what he had to say, if anything, first, and it turned out he didn’t have much to say at all.
I went to lunch around 1:00, and ate chicken, green beans and potatoes, and had tea to drink with it.
The chicken was a little burnt, but not very much, and the potatoes and green beans were awesome.
The tea was like concentrated sugar.
I could definitely use a nap right now.
I put my name in the drawing for a huge TV they’re giving away.
It would be funny if I won it.

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Looks like I’ve got my answer about the upper management type I mentioned in yesterday’s post.
He spouts just as much BS as everyone else around here.
He fed me a whole bunch of crap about how we need to maximize my potential, and how he wants to find a way to put my many talents to good use, and how he’s talking to his people, who are talking to their people … and they’re supposed to have a solution sometime tomorrow.
He tells me he’s going to get them to rewrite the whole damn interface.
Right.
And I’m Jesus Christ.
This guy has told me everything except that he lives in a van down by the river.
I’m starting to choke on all this.

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I met with the upper management type at around 2:30 this afternoon, and he gave me the “I want to help” motivational speech.
I’m not totally sure whether I should believe it or not.
I’ve heard from other people he manages to get things done, but I heard that about everyone who’s ever occupied any upper management position here.
He recommended that we test out all known browsers, so we did, and none of the others tested worked.
Firefox, Netscape, and Opera were all no-goes with Jaws.
Back to the drawing board.

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I just came back from talking to the HR director.
I asked him if there are any other positions available in order to get out of this accessibility rut I’m in, and keep finding myself in.
He says there aren’t any in the local center, and that I can always apply for some other position in some other ConUs center, but that ConUs doesn’t relocate agents, so that would be my problem.
I’m supposed to talk to the upper management this afternoon.
Basically, I’m going to go back to the bigger management cubes, and then the upper manager here is going to call his boss, and we’re going to sit and talk about how the client doesn’t want to set up the mirror to the old interface, because that would cost too much money to maintain for two people, and we’ll be back at square one.
We’re going nowhere fast, and what worries me is that this will be used as an opportunity to tell me to have a nice day.
It’s definitely the path of least resistance, and right now I’m in the middle of a fight between two corporate whores who are more concerned about maximizing their profits, and could care less if one or two cube-dwellers get trampled underfoot because of something that was never their fault in the first place.
I’ve been yelling (figuratively) about this accessibility issue for the last three years, and it’s getting me nowhere, and looks like it may even signal the end of the line for me at this job.
Cary isn’t really helping matters.
He’s content to just follow the directives of his supervisor, take calls, then call the support team to do the work after clicking around awhile, and making the caller think he’s actually helping.
His justification is that they’ll monitor him eventually, see he’s screwing things up and then fire him, and then he’ll be out of the situation.
He’s taking it one day at a time, so that it doesn’t encroach on his sanity.
Whatever floats your boat.
Personally, I’m a fan of self-preservation.
I hate this job, but I can’t afford to lose it.
If I could afford it, I would have quit long ago.
So I’m interested in not only fixing the current crisis, but preventing future ones so that I can save myself future headaches.
I don’t think that’s too unreasonable.
I’d love to be able to just sit back, not worry about all this, and just wander aimlessly throughout life.
But in order to do that, I’d have to have no ambition, or even a desire to keep from slipping into the multitude of blind and visually impaired people who are unemployed.
As much as I hate my job, being unemployed is infinitely worse.
I detest having to rely on the charity of others, regardless of the level of sincerity.
It’s not that I wouldn’t be appreciative, and it’s not that I think people are incapable of giving wholeheartedly.
At this point in my life, I want to be able to provide for myself, without undue stress, and without having to worry about whether or not my livelihood is going to be jeopardized by some company’s pet technological abortion that lived.
Is that really too much to ask?

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I woke up this morning with a raging headache.
Not good.
I haven’t even gotten to work yet, and as of yesterday afternoon, still no solution.
I talked to Cary last night, and he says he’s taking calls, but he’s asking the callers to hold three or four minutes at a time while he wrestles with the interface and Jaws.
Completely unacceptable.
We can’t afford to keep doing that.
I don’t understand why they had to kill the link in the first place.
If they have to upgrade, fine.
But if they’re not going to involve us in testing the thing to make sure it’s accessible, then don’t kill the link.
It’s that simple.
I know I have a lot of sighted readers, but this is one of those times when sighted people really prove how inconsiderate they can be.
To the ones who have been helpful, I sincerely thank you.
But to the rest, please stop making my life difficult.

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I just talked to one of the techno-shepherds, and he told me that the client wants me to use the lates version of the screen reader so that my “testing environment” is the same as theirs.
I’ve already explained several times that the Java support hasn’t changed from V5 (the version I’m using) to V7.
All they did as far as internet applications is concerned was add support for Firefox.
They added some other Jaws-specific features, but no change in Java support.
And what the hell is this about a “testing environment?”
Yet another line of crap.
I was just given a link that goes to “the page cannot be displayed.”
We’ll probably have this thing figured out by the end of the month, just in time for them to break it again.

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I got in this morning to find that the link I use to access the database interface has been killed, and to top it off, the new interface doesn’t work with Jaws.
This is exactly what I thought was going to happen.
And as if things need to be any worse, the person who has all the information about who to contact in order to get the link operative again has been fired.
She wasn’t forward-thinking enough to pass on the information.
Probably wanted to keep it to herself so she could feel important.
There’s the client’s man, who’s perfectly happy to accept the declaration of accessibility handed down from the developers, and then there’s the HTML Specialist, (yes, that’s her actual title), who’s in his pocket, so the results will be pretty much the same from that end.
This is what happens when idiots get put in to positions of power.
We’ve gone through this before, I’ve made it a point to make suggestions and recommendations to the developers to make the damn thing accessible, and no one seems to listen.
Now we get to spend however long arguing this point all over again.
Well, at least this time, I have ‘net access.
I’m not too thrilled about sitting around here serfing the ‘net though.
That’s not why I’m supposed to be here.
I didn’t get up, find out that the conditioner I bought isn’t really conditioner, (not Andrew’s fault, probably some idiot put shampoo in the same place as the conditioner, and he just grabbed because he knows where the conditioner is supposed to be, and assumed that it would be there), then to spend most of the remaining time trying to get a comb and brush through my hair without doing any damage, just to come to work and find out that everything’s been totally screwed up because of someone else’s stupidity.
Why does stupidity have to ruin everything?
I’d love to find a way to make stupidity illegal.
To be fair, I realize that making changes to tons of code is very expensive, and that there are only two employees who require the changes.
But I don’t think it would require a complete overhaul of the system to make it accessible.
Java can be made accessible, it just takes a little consideration to do it.
Given my past dealings, the impression I get is that accessibility really isn’t a concern for more than financial reasons, and they’ll just continue to feed me lines because they think I’ll believe them, and because I really have no choice but to at least act like I do.
What else am I supposed to do?
It’s not like I can just expose some major scam and get the changes made.
If I go making too many waves, it could cost me my job, and I’m sure there’s something they could hide behind to make sure it doesn’t look like a discrimination case.
I’m definitely a proponent of capitalism, but there’s making a profit, and then there’s greed.
Based on what I’ve seen, I firmly believe that both the client and the company I work for are acting as a result of the latter, and not the former.
I wish I was wrong on this one.
The Business Of America Is Business,

TMH’s Bacon Bits, Liberal Common Sense, the Conservative Cat, and MacStansbury.org link to this.

Convergys, accessibility, Express Scripts, computer, MYSQL, database

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I’ve got some woman on the phone who ordered two different strengths of a medication, three months ago, and now claims she never ordered it, and we’re just supposed to credit her for it because she never got them.
The replacement policy is that you have to call no earlier than twelve days and no later than forty-five days after the prescription has been shipped in order to replace the order.
She didn’t, so we assumed she got it, and charged her.
Of course, she wanted to speak to my supervisor.
Somebody needs to tell her it’s too bad, she has to pay for it anyway.

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I got to work this morning, and found that they had turned the heat off last night.
I’m not kidding around.
They actually turned the heat off, and it’s still in the 20’s.
The people who worked the overnight shift litterally had to wear gloves to type.
John says he put in four service requests to have the heat turned on, and one to turn the air on when it gets to eight thousand degrees in here.
I can’t believe it’s really that hard to keep the temperature somewhere near normal.
Idiocy at work.
They released the new upgrade to the database interface today.
I’ve been instructed to use the old link, (which is running very slow today), until the client’s minion comes out, declares that the new version is accessible, and tells me to try out the client’s latest attempt at bestowing a gift on creation.
I get to be the guinney pig again, and that’s a direct quote from John.
I hate being in this positiion.
Why do I always have to be the guinney pig in these situations?
I know I’m the only one who uses a screen reader around here, but it feels like I’m the company’s experiment or something.
“Let’s set up some obstacles, and see if the blind person can make it work!”
Or is it just extreme ignorance.
Who knows.
I didn’t get the support position, or the supervisor position, so I’ll be on the phones a while longer.
There’s got to be a way out of here.
In the meantime, I’ll settle for a little heat.

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Since a good number of you read this blog via your friends pages on LiveJournal, I’ve decided to introduce a new feature to the site in order to acquaint you all with some of the blogs I have on my personal blogroll, as well as blogs I happen to find while browsing.
This morning, while looking at the Open Trackback Alliance blogroll on my sidebar, trying to pick which sites to visit in order to shamelessly promote myself, I found Less People, Less Idiots.
I’ve been sneaking peaks at it all day, (whenever I had a break during work), and I’ve laughed every time.
During lunch, I spent enough time reading it that I laughed so hard I cried.
It’s a mix of satire, black comedy, and political commentary, but you can’t really place this guy on any particular side of the debate.
And that’s what’s so cool.
He appeals to just about everybody, unless you’re thinking of Pat Robertson, who he makes fun of as well.
No one’s left out.
This site deserves your attention, no matter what side of the political battle you’re on, or what faith you belong to.
And in case you’re looking for something deeper, he doesn’t just make fun of people for no reason.
There’s always some message he’s trying to get across.
So give it a look-see, and leave him some comments.
Everyone’s bound to find something at least slightly amusing, and if you say you haven’t, you’re just ashamed to admit you did, and you’re feeling guilty about laughing, and you’ll probably be making an appointment with your shrink.

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I just got done taking a call from a woman who had to be half-baked.
She was completely confused, babbling on about wanting this particular manufacturer’s brand of Hydrocodone, and how she had to have all these special numbers on the back of her prescriptions in order to send them in, and how she was going to find the person who gave her misinformation.
FYI: Members can’t choose the manufacturer of a drug.
It’s not like going to the grocery store and picking up your favorite brand or something.
And why does someone need to take three different strengths of a narcodic like that, along with Alprazolam (the generic for Zanax)?
Really scary.

Shamelessly promoted at: Blogin Out Loud The Land of Ozz Committees of Correspondence

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As stated here, the caller told me the prescription had been called in on the twenty-fifth, which would put it at a perfectly normal processing rate.
When she got on the phone with my supervisor, (actually the Asc member taking supervisor calls), she said that it had been called in on the twenty-third.
How about you get your story right!
I’ll be the first one to admit when I’ve made a mistake, but there’s nothing I hate more than a caller who just wants to get me in trouble because they don’t like what I have to tell them.
She should have given me all the information in the first place.
I could have helped a little more then.
Now, I told her we wouldn’t wave the expedition fee, and then she gets to a supervisor, provides the rest of the details, and gets the fee waved, making me look like a total ass.

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I’ve got a member on the phone who thinks that, even though prescriptions called in normally take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to appear in our system due to their being entered by hand, and even though prescriptions normally take three to five business days to process before they’re shipped, she’s supposed to just magically get it the next morning after her doctor calls it in, and that we’re supposed to expedite the shipping for free because, (according to her), we screwed up.
I explained that the prescription is going through the normal processes, and that there isn’t any way to speed things along, and she wants to speak to my supervisor.
I really hate it when these people act like they own the world, and they’re going to get me reprimanded because they can’t get their way.
Know what that sounds like?
“I’m telling on you!”
“Mommy, she didn’t give me exactly what I want, so I’m going to throw a temper tantrum!”
Get over yourself!
You’re not any better than the rest of us, so quit acting like it.
OK, done ranting now.

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We had another team meeting today.
We got new (or at least passed-off-as-new) information from the client.
It’s official: We’re not allowed to transfer a helpdesk call to the helpdesk.
Any helpdesk calls we get we have to handle, and that includes the groups we don’t service for members but do for pharmacies.
Project merging is in the air.
I took the test today to finish the application for the support team.
I had to bring the craptop (that’s the nickname I’ve given my five-year-old laptop) to work in order to take it because I don’t have write permissions on any drives anymore.
The test itself wasn’t hard, but figuring out which terms to search for in ORMess was.
I really wish they’d employ a more robust search tool.
It would make life easier.
But then, that’s me thinking logically again, and we just can’t have that, now can we?

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I just got a call from someone who tried to appeal a rejected claim that isn’t even in the system.
In other words, they’re putting the cart before the horse, (or the reindeer before the slay for all you Christmas enthusiasts).
Then, I was told how to do my job, and that there doesn’t need to be a claim in the system in order to make an appeal.
If this is the kind of Christmas cheer I have to deal with, then I’d gladly wipe Christmas and everything associated with it off the calendrical map.
I’m so tired of the commercialism, the greed, and the ideals that are hopelessly held up as the standard when no one even comes close to making it that far.
This is supposed to be the “most wonderful time of the year” for all the Goyim, and most of you make it the worst time of the year for folks like me who are stuck on the phones dealing with the crap, while being told by my employer to make sure you can hear my smile.
I promise, there is no smile to be heard.
To all the sincere Goyim, (and there are some), I commend you for your sincerity and kindness throughout this time when your peers make it exceedingly difficult on everyone.
I wish you a very merry Christmas, and hope your celebration of your savior’s birth is very meaningful.
But to the rest, please don’t spread any more of your Christmas cheer.
We’re only a week into the holiday season, and I’m already sick of the havoc you always manage to wreak on society.

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