You mentioned in your anecdotes the SAP-based time recording system. It was truly awful. For me it meant spending 30 to 40 minutes entering about the same information I once took 5 minutes to do using the old Public Service style DWR books – providing it didn’t stop half way thru. One of its’ quirks was that trying to get a screen dump (PrtScrn key) would crash your PC. I made a big stink about the user interface to a Level 2 manager – this resulted in me getting a phone call from a lady from SAP, who proceeded to treat me as computer-phobic moron. After some discussion, she used the facility to remotely view/access my PC. After realising that one of the bugs I reported was in fact extant, she told me she would get a screen dump. I promptly said “NO NO NO – YOU’LL CRASH IT”. She didn’t believe me and virtually called me a fool. Then my PC froze. I waited about 5 minutes. Then she said “I’ve crashed it haven’t I?” And hung up. I never heard from her again.

I then refused to use it. So did others. This prompted a manager to threaten dire consequences unless we did. Well I didn’t. After a quite a few months I decided to log in and see if anything had changed. I was surprised to see that someone had entered realistic looking but totally wrong data for my time use for the entire period. Next time I talked to my boss, I thanked him for looking after it for me. His response was somewhat bizarre. Whoever entered the data wasn’t me, it wasn’t him, and it wasn’t anyone that we could discover!

I later learnt from a cousin who is a SAP expert that the time recording system they inflicted on us was an obsolete version SAP supplied to Telstra, widely known to be a horror. She told me that it had been rolled out in a gas company, and quickly withdrawn due to mass staff complaints. She was amazed it was the time recording system in a company with over 40,000 employees.