Don't you hate when something is screwed up at work, and it's a mess and you have to fix it, and you can't even complain because it's totally your own fault? I hate that.
The screwed up thing is at Stoneline. Last night I went to install the 2005 update for their tax tables. Turns out it only runs on the latest version of Aatrix, the payroll program, which is two versions newer than the one we're using. I get on the phone to order the new version, but the bastards had closed ten minutes before (5 pm Central time). Search the Aatrix website and it looks like they don't even sell the program anymore; it's bundled with Quickbooks now. Okay, so we have to update Quickbooks. No problem, I call the Apple store and they have it in stock. great, I can run over there and buy it, go back to Stoneline and install it, not problem. Except that the new version of Quickbooks is system 10 only. And Stoneline are still running 9. Yikes!
So now we have to get them upgraded to 10, and we're not even sure their computers can handle it. Well actually, one of the two computers probably can, but the other one seems doubtful. We have to get them upgraded at both the home office and the shop, because he writes the paychecks at the shop and I do the payroll taxes at the home office. And we have to get it done now, because it's 2005 and they're still using 2004 tax tables.
It looks like what we're going to do is get a new computer for the shop, and upgrade the one in the home office. If we can't get that done by next Wednesday, I'll install Quickbooks on my own laptop and take it in with me.
You might be thinking that we should have dealt with this a while ago, and you'd be right. And it was my screw up, can't blame it on anyone else. The problem is that Aatrix kind of sucks. You have to wait until after your last 2004 pay period to update the tax tables, they don't give you any way to go back after you do the end of the year conversion. So by the time we were ready, the Stoneline folks had left for a 3 week vacation. And I obviously couldn't have bought a new computer without them. Still, I should have figured out what was going on while they were gone. I was just too wrapped up with a huge web deadline and my own vacation and that whole stomach flu thing and so forth.
On the bright side, I think that once they get used to system 10 they'll really like it. I will too, because I won't have to deal with 9 crashing anymore. Also, because of all this I went ahead and upgraded to 10.3 on my laptop. Just installed it about an hour ago. It doesn't seem too different. Except the Font Book, which is so cool I nearly wet my pants. Finally Apple built something into the system that will let me preview fonts! I have so many fonts that without Adobe Type Manager it's really hard to keep track of them. Mail seems to work better too.
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