Paltry Ribaldry

So Optimus Prime over there has a tendency to tell fat jokes on himself which fits this topic perfectly. He says, "I said I wanted an Atlas body, but this is ridiculous." He followed this up with, "Is that why they call it a hemisphere?" To which he added, "I know that's an orbit around me, but what's with the crack in the moon?" This whole discussion began when he complained that the last two days were hard on him because the sky was falling and there wasn't enough intelligent conversation around here with me in training. Ahh.... He said there just wasn't enough of him to go around and that was saying something. Groan....

So what the heck is paltry ribaldry? Well, the Queen was reading Jane Eyre, and one of the characters commented on the paltry ribaldry of the common folk, and neither one of us had any idea what this meant. I knew paltry, but ribaldry was completely new to me. I'm telling you, some of the language in that book is just not commonplace.

Anyway, we looked up the words (which took a bit of doing on two dictionary websites), to get a feel for what the author was trying to say in this expression. What it amounted to was worthless off-color humor, or perhaps petty lewdness or even the hollow sexual pursuits of the lower classes.

I related this in my head to a conversation I'd overheard when I was in the military. I was walking to my barracks and heard two grunts behind me talking about what they were going to do with their upcoming weekend. This was really the only part of the conversation I heard, but it summed up for me what this person in the book was likely talking about when he referred to paltry ribaldry. Grunt 1 asked grunt 2, "so what are you going to do this weekend?" Grunt 2 replied with complete honesty and seriousness, "Oh, I don't know. Get drunk and get laid."

Hm, thought I. Easy as that. At the time I'd heard this conversation, I'd not so much as had a date, so the idea that finding such things out there in the world somewhere was a concept somewhat foreign to me. I had an idea that this sort of thing went on, and the moral ineptitude of it still resonated despite my naivety. But that was the life of a young grunt. Blow crap up. Get drunk. Get laid. Lather, rinse, repeat. Paltry ribaldry.

So to end it, there was this air traffic controller on the ground who called up to one of the two planes circling the runway, and said, "Make right turn two-niner-zero for noise abatement." The pilot called back down and said, "Noise abatement? What are you talking about? It's five o'clock in the afternoon." The controller called back up and said, "Have you ever heard the sound of two planes crashing together?"

So the next time you hear someone discussing their lecherous weekend or someone tells a joke that perhaps isn't entirely safe for work, you can say (at least in the back of your head) "All this paltry ribaldry is simply intolerable."

Training

You know, there are needs for training in the workplace. In the instance I went through it recently, we're getting a new system in place to track our system issues for the clients and ourselves. This training is a necessary part of the learning of the system, but wow, does it have to be so boring?

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy learning new things, and when we were learning new things about this new system, it was a very interesting time. However, not everybdy in the world "gets" these things as easily as I do, and those wh are quicker on the draw don't understand the point of the training class. There may be no such thing as a stupid question, but there are questions that are out of turn.

The trainer, here, repeatedly said that he wasn't teaching our in house processes, but only the conceptual workings of the system. This way, we would know how the system worked and could adapt it to our process, whatever that may be. A lot of people had a lot of trouble grasping this, and continued to ask questions that a) dealt with only their part of the business and b) we were going to cover at a later part of the course.

He ended up answering b-type questions when they came up in brief, which only lead to more questions and more time wasted (and more boredom on my part). The a-type questions, though, were always more incessant and more demanding, and even though we did have two people who knew the basics of the processes we were going to follow, they weren't clear on everything because the system isn't live yet. Did you understand that, people? The system isn't live yet, and so they don't know yet.

Another question had to do with the grouping of clients since it is no longer done by the facilities' IDs, but by a single ID assigned to the contract as a whole. We knew that we were going to look up the individual ID in another system to cross reference, but this one person was all but demanding an explanation of how one specific client would work, and the helper who knew the processes wasn't familiar with that specific client's contracts (as they have several), and so could not answer this until they look at the system when it's up. This person refused to let it go, and made it a parking lot question (that's a question to be reviewed later). Nevermind that once the system goes love, it would take probably 30 seconds to answer it then.

This was a big reason I didn't ask a lot of in-depth questions. First, I understood how the system worked, and could easily adapt it to whatever the powers-that-be tell me to do with it. Second, I knew a lot of these people would remember little to NOTHING about what they learned today, so the review process would be beyond extensive, and drilled into our heads by the time the go-live date comes in three weeks.

I have the learning capacity to pick stuff up in one session. Three weeks of drills, and I'm an expert before I ever touch it. That's why they love me.

And if you think that's conceited... Well, sometimes the truth sounds that way, doesn't it?

Lazy People

Perhaps I've complained of lazy people before, but this group really takes the prize on laziness. Optimus and I got a set of three tickets containing problems with our Medicare product, so we jumped on them to decipher the issues. 

First one was an id coming back as invalid. Ok, so I dug in. I opened a log file for one of the jobs that ran and discovered the problem fairly quickly. In fact, I didn't even need to look in a log file, since this info would have been just as easily found on the screen where the accounts are stored. Just how valid would a user id of "none" be anyway? Literally, someone typed the word none in the field. I gave Optimus 5 seconds to find the problem, and he found it.

Then he did the same to me moments later and started counting before I got ot his desk. Of course, it didn't take long to see the reason that person's claims weren't processing. You see, last week was what we refer to as an F.I. transition. That's where the payer that actually pays the claim submitted to Medicare transitions their connection to someone else, and that usually entails new IDs. What we do is disable the old IDs and markthem with TBR, which means to be removed. Optimus' person had a page full of these IDs. Think we got them figured out.

My last one was about secondary claims not being created all week. I looked into their jobs and found none of the necessary jobs had processed at all. A little further in showed no calid IDs. I went to that screen and found, once again, TBR off to the side of three IDs.

The point of all this is this: all of these could have been done in a few minutes by the people who submitted the tickets to make someone else do it for them. Sure, the call takers have a 10 minute time limit, but these were seconds to figure out and deliver the message. Why did people have to wait for this? 

Well, the answer is simple: "not my job."