Awoke today to the strange sight of steam rolling off the garden fence as the bright winter sun melted the morning frost. I'd take a photo of it, except that between the tone of that first sentence and the fact that vapour doesn't come out on digital pictures, you'd just think I was having emotional problems.
We successfully left the house yesterday and went to Caroline and Al's for mulled wine and exceptionally bracing schnapps. Drain cleaner for humans. Or in the case of the stuff Will brought, possibly it was actually drain cleaner. Lovely. Nice to interact with some other people for a bit, anyway, just to keep in practise. Adam's been over a couple of times in the last week, but he's more or less as strange as we are.
I have been working from home this week and have sent more e-mails than I received. Apart from spam, obviously. Normally I'd guess I get 50-100 work mails a day, and now I'm down to about 5. I sense that if I were in the office, I wouldn't have anyone to talk to. Certainly none of the people I've needed things from have replied.
Because of this, on Monday I tried to check something for myself in the finance system,
SAP, and inadvertently logged into into Kafka's novel,
Der Prozess instead. So I click "Display requisition". It says "You are not authorised to use transaction ZE53N". I blink at the 8-digit number I have written down, which bears no resemblance to ZE53N. I didn't ask about ZE53N. I don't know what it means. I just want to type in my number and see if there's a tick or a cross next to it. I click "Help". It says "This function is not linked to Sales Administration". I'm fairly sure that's a non-sequitur. Nothing else I try works either. Given that I had to get a new password because I hadn't used SAP for a bit, and in the mean time they have changed everything so that my cheat-sheet doesn't apply, I give up.
Somewhere in a German software development company in Walldorf, Morbo the green alien from
Futurama rubs his hands together and says "tremble, earthlings! By designing this software based on a flowchart of every conceivable corporate financial activity instead of based on tasks someone might need to perform, I will destroy your puny human minds!" [manic laughter].
# posted by Carl - 11:03 AM
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