Asklemmy

I work at a roadhouse and art gallery. It’s a cloud-based app that manages our bookings. My list of complaints includes, but is not limited to:

• The software is just a shell for a VM, running on a server in Canada. This was their solution for “cloud” access… Because why bother coding an actual locally-run program to connect to an external server, when you can just connect the user directly to the server and have it run in a VM? It means everything we do is bogged down by round-trip latency to and from Canada, plus the server’s processing lag because it’s running a VM for every user that is connected. Opening an event’s detail page easily takes 15-20 seconds. So does adding/changing anything in an event. In an average day, I manage anywhere from 10-30 events. We joke that all of our events are planned via carrier pigeon, because of the latency and long load times.
• It cannot send an alert to users when specific things are changed on a booking. Our labor manager wants to be able to get an alert whenever an event planner changes the labor. Makes sense, right? This was marketed as a key feature of the software, and it was why the labor manager originally wanted to use the software. It is entirely broken.
• The software also features a website, for the part timers to be able to access the event data… The website is completely broken.
• The website cannot show event drawings or floor plans, despite the fact that the floor plans are a large part of the part-timers’ jobs. They set the rooms up prior to events, but they can’t see what they’re supposed to set up, because the website doesn’t support that feature. This was marketed as a feature when we purchased the software.
• To work around the lack of room diagrams on the website, I tried to set up an automated report to compile the day’s event setups, and email them to everyone. I set up a filter to ignore events without a diagram, so only events with listed drawings would show up in the report. The filter works when I run it manually. The automated report ignores the filter, and spits out a ton of blank pages for each empty event. This has resulted in a “boy who cried wolf” effect, where the part-timers don’t bother checking the automated report because they assume it will be like 40 empty pages.
• the server has a 20 minute session timer. You’d think this means you can be logged in for 20 minutes at a time… Maybe even that it starts counting after your last activity, so you can remain logged in while active, then get automatically logged out after you walk away... You would be incorrect. The server logs every user out, on a rolling 20 minute timer. You just logged in 60 seconds before the timer tripped? Fuck you, log in again. It isn’t even on a nice round number, (like every hour on the :00, :20, and :40 marks), because the timer is based on whenever the server was last rebooted. Logging in easily takes 45-60 seconds for the VM to load.

Again, this is a non-exhaustive list. These are simply the more mind-numbingly frustrating things I have to deal with on a daily basis.