A user's persistence pays off in the case of the problematic download About a decade ago, I worked in IS. I did everything from programming nifty reports in an antiquated, DOS-based language to fixing toilets (because the IS department had screwdrivers handy for dissecting both PCs and toilets). Then I changed jobs and hats, and became “Just a User.” Unfortunately for IS departments everywhere, that automatically makes me a Difficult User. In my current Difficult User position, I work in the health care industry and run lots of reports from lots of software tools and morph them into something useful for upper management. For a particular vendor with whom we do business, my rep, “Johnny,” would send me this specific E&P report monthly. The report contains historical spend volume data for all different lines of business with different manufacturers and is an integral part of knowing whether or not we’re saving money. It got to be a big report, needed to be zipped, and subsequently got hijacked by our company spaminator on a regular basis. Because of our (highly legislated) sensitive data, our IS department does not bend very easily on security. Now being a Difficult User, I began to resent the time I wasted just opening the report and decided to find a better solution. I talked to Johnny, who said, “you know, most of our clients go to our Web site and download it themselves.” Well, OK! How come you didn’t tell me that before?! The E&P report has lines of detail that include four date fields. These fields should either be blank or have dates, based on the files Johnny provides from their system. The report was available for download in CSV or PDF. Since the PDF was huge and did not include the date fields — which I needed in the first place — I downloaded the report from the Web site in CSV format. The date fields all said “NULL.” (Not null as in blank, but the actual text characters “NULL.”) But there really were dates for many of those lines, and they were present all over the vendor’s Web interface as well as in Johnny’s report. I told Johnny, and he said “e-mail Solutions@Johnny’scompany.com, there’s nothing I can do.” Ahhhhh, Solutions. What a great name for a department!I e-mailed Solutions, with a copy of the downloaded report and a copy of Johnny’s, noting explicitly what was wrong and in which fields. I followed up for 2 months. I finally got an e-mail that said pretty much “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” I raised a stink, then my boss raised a stink, and we got it escalated to the VP of business development, who escalated it internally. Solutions then sent me an e-mail saying they’d sent the problem to their programmers. A week later, I got an e-mail from Solutions saying the programmers noted that the reports are the same, and that the only difference is that I’m getting more information. I responded very pleasantly, thanking them for their time and eventual response, and then asked why they believed that getting incorrect information — “NULL” — constituted more information. I got a call from the young lady who drew the short straw, and the response from her programmers was that the CSV file had more columns than the PDF file, and that’s why it was more information. Huh? I thought this the dumbest response, and I couldn’t believe they’d think a paying client should be OK with this.A few weeks later, Solutions e-mailed me and told me to try to use their new, improved, Beta Web interface to run the report instead. I tried, but every time I clicked on any Report link (which I was told should take me to a parameters page), it gave me the Page Not Found error. Solutions decided there was something wrong with my system or my browser because they could log in as me and get to the report.I contacted my internal IS department. To cover all bases, we upgraded Windows. We upgraded IE. We upgraded all kinds of things. I had to download and install 56 security patches. It took all day. I couldn’t do any work in the meantime. I still got Page Not Found. My boss got Page Not Found. My internal IS department got Page Not Found. I went home that evening and tried from home, and got Page Not Found. Aha! I called Solutions, asked for “Joe” — because he’s the last person at Solutions to draw the short straw — and told him about my experiment. I asked him, “Are you certain you can get to the report from a PC outside your own network?” He tried it from a PC not in his building, and he got Page Not Found. Joe actually apologized. He couldn’t believe that I’d been the only person to have reported this problem. So of course, my being the only complainer, they had assumed it was my problem and not theirs. My boss and I thought this was funny -– it meant nobody was using their system, they had not asked any of their clients to test the Beta version, and apparently they weren’t running any data analysis to see how many clients were using it — or not. Since the programmers couldn’t seem to wriggle out of this one, I got the opportunity to essentially redesign the E&P while the programmers worked out the bugs on their end. The report is now available online — and it even works too! On a side note, this vendor wants us to ditch one of our other, more accurate and attentive software vendors and use one of their proprietary software applications instead. Not unless I get 50 percent commission, buddy. Regards, Difficult User #16,738 Data Management