Something that, over the years, I've found to frustrate me a great deal is when people get stuck in routines that are weird, annoying or unproductive. To be perfectly honest, this is where a lot of my frustrations with my current day job come from.
I'm not going to share details — largely because they're quite dull, not that that has ever stopped me from writing about something on here! — but suffice to say that the work we do is so set in its ways now that it feels like it would be impossible to convince the people who have been there longer than me to try something differently.
Which is annoying, because anyone can see that the way we do things is stupid. We had a conference call with our US counterparts a few weeks back, where one of our team demonstrated what we had to do, and I could practically see their bewildered faces as she demonstrated the myriad hoops we have to jump through to do something that should, in theory, be pretty simple: sending text off for translation, then putting that text in the right place for the right countries.
Part of the trouble is something I think I've mentioned before, which is our reliance on proprietary tools. Every place I've worked that has had tools built specifically for them has ended up with these stupid, pointless procedures, because inevitably the tools end up being used for something they weren't designed for in the first place. In our case, we are using a tool that was originally designed for managing the localisation of email messages — a function it performed with one of the most hideous, unintuitive interfaces I've ever seen, I might add — for localising web pages, which is entirely different.
There are better solutions out there more suitable for the job at hand. But at this point making use of them would require a complete shake-up of everything a significantly sized team of people does on a daily basis. So I just have to grit my teeth and get on with it!
Doesn't mean I can't have a good whinge now and again, though. It's therapeutic. Thank you for indulging me!
Discover more from I'm Not Doctor Who
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
