Waiting for doughnuts

Now then, ladies and gentlemen of my friends list, let me stress once again keep your money under your mattress! Today we are trying to fix a problem, now months old, with the system that keeps track of any special instructions you may give to the bank like putting a hold on a cheque, a postdated transaction, transfers and such. From out investigation so far this has been fucked up for all of western Canada since August 2000 - yes, that's right, the last year. I've wanted to rewrite this application since I walked in here and first looked at it because I could see right away what a bloody mess it is. I'm not actually allowed to do that though. When I used to be a teller these sort of things were handled in-branch, on paper, stored in the back room for two years so they could be manually retreived when needed, and archived on-paper in a central store for seven more years. If something fucked up you could go in, talk to a teller, that teller could go into the back and find the transaction and find out what happened. Now, in what is touted as "improvement" the tellers can't actually get their hands on the transactions and everything is processes centrally - soon this bank will be doing the bulk of such processing in Guangzhou. Problem with an NSF cheque (like I had with the Royal Bank a couple months ago), come back tomorrow after I've checked with our processing centre in China. Then, if the customer is really luck they might get an answer when they come pack if the operator in Gaungzhou can find the document in the fucked up system. If they can't then the call goes to the central help desk, and gets forwarded to my group. Then if we're allowed to, if we're not on some other "priority 1" job, one of us might go down to the data centre (we're aren't supposed to be "wasting" our time on trouble calls) and retreive the document, which because of the time difference won't end up being seen by anyone in China until the next day. Then another day goes by while they do what they do and get back to the teller who originally made the request. So it can easily take a week to look something up that once entailed ten minutes look for a box in the back room. A couple of months ago this would have really pissed me off, now I just don't care.