Communication

Why is it so hard?

Due to the action of another department at work I have been landed with trying to explain exactly what areas this action has impacted.

I don't think I was taken terribly seriously to begin with.

Problem was identified on Monday afternoon. I contacted one person who was unfortunately not going to be able to help me on Tuesday due to being on a training day. He did reply to me to tell me this, however, and I thank him for advising me. Thanks, SB.

Problem escalated early Tuesday afternoon when I identified another group of data that was affected by "enemy action". This is when I contacted the database helpdesk.

I spoke with the person who had been given the action to perform which had created my problem. He is a Trainee and is only doing his job. He explained that he had performed the action for seven groups of data that would affect my work area.

My headache grew.

He did mention that at the time he was given the task he thought that performing the action would possibly adversely affect some part of the data. (Go with that gut feeling!)

He liaised with his Manager to see whether they could rectify the situation. I requested a copy of the data that I no longer had access to and also a list of the groups that had been affected. The list I now have, the data is taking a bit longer to appear.

I received a call late today from the Manager of the area. He advised that he had relinked part of the data and that new information should come through without any problems.

Hmm.

We went through the process that I perform to record data on the system and that worked.

Yes, good. I don't actually know whether we have recorded receipt of information for this piece of data before through.

Oh.

And there are five different distribution points for this piece of information, I don't know to which point it would have been sent.

Oh.

If we did receive the data, I have no record of what date it would have been entered originally.

Oh. I am beginning to see what you mean.

What has happened to the data that we have already entered? We didn't keep paper records because to keep updating every time we added a new piece of information would have taken longer than trying to record everything.

Oh. This is a little more involved than I thought. You say that there is more than one group affected by this?

Yes. (Thinking, there are potentially 4000 individual records affected by this just for my work area.)

I'll have to look a bit further in to this and come back to you.

Thanks.

End the painful dream...