My condolences! Please accept some Lindt dark chocolate with chili and cherry filling. (Hey, you don't have to be female for chocolate to help!)
Regarding the diversion of the thread to discussions of chocolate, I remind you all that this was a bribe to me NOT to rant about something absolutely NONE of you want to hear about.
I consider myself sufficiently bribed. You may return to your ranting and venting.
My contribution:
I've been wanting to change the visual theme of the website I administer (for a public university) for about a year (more or less since I was hired into this job). For all that time, I was told that the "Technology Committee" needed to meet to discuss the website before I could make changes. So I waited. And waited. Members were elected to the committee. I waited. The interim dean didn't seem inclined to appoint the needed additional members to the committee. I waited. The new Dean came in last July, and was busy with other things. I waited. The Dean eventually appointed the missing members. Oddly enough, I wasn't included (why should the tech people be on a technology committee, after all?) Everyone else was busy with semester stuff. I waited some more. (Actually, at this point, I started to plot a coup, but I was asked quite nicely by my manager to hold off a bit while he tried to talk the Dean into nudging things along.) Eventually I was told, after the committee had met three times, that I would be invited to the next meeting. (You can imagine what happened next. No? I waited, of course.) It's been months. There has been no "next meeting."
Meanwhile, the graduate program office has been complaining more or less constantly about the website, with me reminding them that I can't do anything until the tech committee meets. Finally, I tried to get the member of the tech committee who's in the graduate office to get involved in a pilot of a new theme specifically to meet grad office complaints. No, she didn't want to do that, because the grad office was about to get a new director, and one of the candidates was also on the tech committee, so she thought that would be a bad political move, I guess. Fine. A week later, the director was chosen, and it wasn't the person on the tech committee. Fine. She still didn't want to give input.
At this point I went to the Dean, asked for 30 seconds of his time, showed him the new theme, and got the green light to proceed without involving the tech committee (on the grounds that I wasn't changing functionality, only doing "a little clean-up.") I sent the tech committee members a courtesy note explaining that I planned to make changes within the next week and asking them to review the new visual theme on the test server. I got one response back (not from the graduate office). A week later, I made the switch.
That was all two weeks ago. Yesterday the woman from the graduate office told me that the site still didn't look good in her opinion. I suggested that it would have been nice to receive that input
before I'd made the theme change, but I still offered to have a focus session with the graduate office to collect their requirements and try to arrange things to meet their needs. She had all kinds of reasons why she couldn't do that right now.
I think some people would rather complain than actually fix things.
Not me, though. I've been considering sending a plague of locusts. Any other suggestions?
