Chris Saul's Blog

Monday December 01, 2008

Off on hols

We're off to Sri Lanka tomorrow to see some friends during the National Day and Eid holidays here.

We'll have good fun, but we were supposed to be going to Thailand. Mrs Saul has been wanting to go there for a long time - everything was booked and paid for, but then the current group of protestors decided to destroy the lifeblood of their economy by occupying the airports.

I know nothing about Thai politics, but I find it odd that a group described by the BBC as a mix of middle class businessmen and monarchists would be the type of people to be doing this kind of thing.

I feel sorry for everyone trapped in Bangkok's airports, but even more sorry for the hundreds of tourist related businesses who'll love millions over the coming months as tourists go to safer destinations.

Tedious expenses admin

I've been ploughing through my expenses this afternoon.

People who create a product should be forced to use it themselves, so that they can understand what they are inflicting on their customers.

The same goes for someone designing apartments in an iconic development, as well as for people writing software that process expenses.

I can only assume that the developers who created our expense tool have never been on a business trip in their lives.

Every item I submit can have a currency associated with it, but the exchange rate for that currency cannot be set in one place for an entire report. What I would like to be able to is to set the exchange rate for, say, Bosnian Marks, once at the beginning of a report. I would then like to add each expense item and simply assign the right currency to it.

I can't. Each and every non UAE Dirham line item has to have the currency applied and then the exchange rate set. This can get quite tedious. 40 expense items from my trip to Vegas recently required the UAE Dirham to Dollar rate to be entered each time. Each time you enter it, the page refreshes. Tedious.

Equally, every meal requires the number of attendees and their names. Fair enough, but I reckon that 90% of these kinds of entries has 'one' for the number of attendees and 'me' for the name. It'd be much more helpful to have a default setting that uses the most common entry rather than having to enter the same info each and every time.

Time to submit a 'request for enhancement'. I expect I will be retiring by the time it's implemented, if I haven't jumped off my balcony in sheer frustration at being asked to confirm the attendees present when I enjoyed a bottle of water from the mini-bar in the Algiers Hilton.

Kafka would feel at home

I spent some time on the phone today with our property developer.

When it rained this weekend, wet patches appeared on our ceiling and on the dining room wall. It's crystal clear that there are structural problems causing the leaks.

To get the developer to look into this, I am not able simply to contact them telling them there are leaks. I have to get a service provider to come and look at the leaks and then submit a report to the developer telling them that there are leaks. The developer may then fix the problem. Or may not.

I will be visiting the customer service centre in person tomorrow.