Quickbooks. That is another company I’ll have to write a thank you note for creating so much business. I see that Intuit has not learned a single thing since I first looked at their product some twenty years ago. It sucked then and it sucks now. They have enabled an entire generation of dim-witted filing clerks to go in and instantly mess up a set of books at warp speed. And I get paid to sort things out.
Don, that is the new client. He met me just in time. His existing system is a shambles. Nobody wants to tell him his last clerk was a dolt. Only the sincerely unable to think can royally mess up a set of books and still make them balance. The basic problem with Intuit is the difficulty of backing out of a wrong entry. I don’t necessarily mean reversing transactions. Don’s books are full of spelling errors in the inventory module that nobody knows how to delete.
[Author's note 2017: Quickbooks to this day retains the same basic faults as the original system. They are the inability for an administrator level user to delete or fix an entry and a system that, by default, obeys tax law instead of good accounting practice. No, they are not the same. In real life, when in doubt, deduct.
There are other serious problems with Quickbooks including a tendency to shut itself down. Or how about the number of steps needed to make a bank deposit? I used to suspect Quickbooks was going on line to your bank account to check if you were lying or not.]
Oh, and hooray to Memorex, another gang of pencil-dicks. Their new CD-R package is designed with an inner plastic wrapper forcing you to completely remove all the CDs from the spindle to get rid of it. Then you have to reverse this and stack the now loose pile of CDs back onto the peg. Put them together for Memorex.
Back home after nine hours accounting, I climbed on my wheels and made it to Aventura and back, stopping for coffee at the Barn. They had only one book on CSS in the place. I stopped at Office Bunker and mentioned to the staff that they had no place outside to lock up a bicycle. They said they didn’t know. I said I do, and now so do they. Florida is proof that no matter how little you pay, there will always be somebody dumb and desperate enough to both take your zero job and make you look totally stupid as well for hiring them.
JZ is driving over tomorrow so we can bike to the seafood festival. Here is a picture of him in my hallway a couple months ago. The only really narrow hallway in my place, but a well used one – you have to go through it to the bathroom. Ah, I see the old fridge still there, with the obligatory picture of Robynette. That was the day we fixed my sink, JP is wearing his brother’s shirt.
It was past dark when I got out of the Barn. I go to lengths to read new things about history. There is a book about the winter of 1941 in Moscow, it looks around 400 pages. Not that I have time to read, but the few passages I saw show a facet of life under Communism that could probably not have been published not that long ago. I am quite aware that even the tamest accounts of what happened there would make excellent required reading for anyone who thinks things are rough today. Careful, I am not saying that any American soldier who would ride through a hostile countryside pinned up in an armored vehicle which is virtually blind to all approaches is not a brave soldier. I think he is, among other things, also very brave.
My conclusion about Barbarossa is that the Soviet situation promoted utterly brutal men into supreme command. I don’t completely buy that story that there has never been a war between two democracies, due to the American Civil War, since only one side called it so. That, to me, was an anomaly, a truly strange war between two different countries, both of which were democratic. All other major civil wars featured one side that was totalitarian, and in the case of Barbarossa, two sides of it. To look to the most horrid combats, look into the soldiers accounts of these wars. I will, if I have the time.
I brought some of the work home from Don’s, he is leaving Monday to return on the 15th, the opposite of what I first thought. The way his system is set up creates at least three times as much work as necessary. Where I am wary of criticizing another accountant, I have no such problem telling off a computer ignoramus, and the last one was a gimptard supreme.
I mean, if you are nothing but a screw-up in this life, at least screw up consistently so others can work around you. If you have a series of files that are related, at least try to follow some kind of pattern when you name them. Another thing Sally, try to put the files in the same directory on a computer, if you can figure out what a directory is. Last, a spreadsheet is not the place to be demonstrating your eye for color fashion coordination. I had to change nearly forty reports where her lovely “Ice Blue” color was dithering. I wonder how many hours she wasted on that – and also, while there were no backup copies, there were five or six different versions of each workbook, all dated 12/31/05. Maybe that’s what happens when you try to make backups with a mouse in one hand and a Twinkie in the other?
For dramatic effect, here are some of the books I’m tallying up. These are books that someone foreign has bought the rights to translate and publish. Besides, here is a valid chance to use the bullet function. A partial list with my smart ass comments included:
The ABC’s of Face Reading (read my lips?)
Do’s and Don’t of Hypoglycemia (not a typo, only one “Don’t”)
Advanced Hypnotism (you are sleepy, buy this book)
Empowered Pregnancy (no comment)
Jewish Heroes and Heroines (a short story?)
Money Management for College Students (may I have some to practice on?)
20 Days Hath September (A for originality)
Torah Lifestyle (first you take the dynamite…)
Later in the day, I ran some of the sheets through the OCR. It works reasonably well, but in this case the printout is barely worth the effort. I’ve categorized the list of books so a given order can be tracked using the ISBN. Here’s an observation. The worst seller and cheapest book on the list (understand that this book is still in print and selling) is “101 Ways To Make Sex Sensational”. It sold thirteen copies for around $7. Nine were returned. Presumably by the same person?
The most returned book so far is the “Complete Guide to Memory Mastery”. One wonders how anyone who would buy such a book could remember to keep the sales slip.
The book most often returned for a higher price than paid for it was “Help Your Child Excel in Math”. Makes sense – the clerk needed it worse than the child.
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