Why technology frustrates me, and other rants

After inadvertently becoming sucked into hours of "routine computer maintenance" this evening, I have solidified my love/hate relationship with technology. Tonight's excruciatingly involved process (I won't bore you with the details) highlighted how naive I was to believe that Adaware, quarterly defragmentation, and scanning my hardrive kept everything maintained and safe. I probably should have taken a clue when I saw the "Geek Squad" at Best Buy were charging hundreds of $$ to dejunk and secure a PC. I'm sure my current maintenance/security woes are all my fault - damn you P2P platforms...sigh, but in all honesty, what would I do without my ESPN All Asia??!! Crapitty-crap-crap; no solution. Sigh.

I still really like my job, so that is a bit less ranty. However, the happy "new job" haze has cleared and I'm beginning to see some things that really need to be improved. That's a good thing because it means I can bring alot to the project, but it also means the job isn't necessarily "prescribed." I'm the first fully-dedicated Finance person the project has hired, therefore much of my job is trying to centralise and standardise information and procedures. This effort can be rather frustrating since when I leave work, my Peruvian counterpart is just arriving at his office, and my Vietnamese colleague is sound asleep. Now, in this situation let's say your project's funder sends an urgent last-minute request for financial figures just as you are ready to leave... As you can see, the financial information needs to be accessed more easily to allay everyone's frustration. Not a simple task though. As I said to a coworker today - "baby steps, baby steps."