Grrr

So I sit here, trying to calm down after a near violence inducing fit thrown by yours truly. You see, here at the ninjamunkey home away from home (work) we have these little scanners, much like what most retailers use, in order to catalog parts for shipment. I was not involved in the team that configured them, was only the original assignee to set them up in the first place. Today, the team that did the actual programming is on thier 2nd day of vacation. And I have found a major flaw. I wont bore you all with the details, but suffice it to say, they effed it up royally. Imagine having 2 units named the same, trying to do different things. So I am trying to get things working, and get a bit fustrated. I call my "boss" and ask him what I should do. He has the approach that since we were not really trained, there is not much we can do but bandaid the situation. Here is where i get annoyed.

You see, anywhere I have ever worked, we had the "hit by a bus" program. Say person A does something, and is pretty much the subject expert. If he were to be hit by a bus, then no one would know anything about his job. So he trained another person, and then created documentation on what he did. That way, it was a covered subject. Here, not so much.

So while I know that it is not my fault that I am stuck supporting software and pieces of hardware I do not know anything about, I still feel responsible when I cannot get them to work. Makes me feel like I have no idea as to what is going on, and when I get to feeling like that, the stress, fustration, and irritation boil over. I feel like I am expendable at that point. I mean why pay someone to be here if they dont know what is going on?

So my boss just called me after I sent him an email titled "seriously screwed up" telling me that it would be ok, and to calm down and dont have a panic attack. Sure, good advice, but shouldnt he be the one to panic one in a while? Shouldn't he have a sense of urgency that I cannot find anywhere else in this company?