What were they thinking?

Sometimes, one just wants to get a pair of pliers and go after an application developer with the pliers held low. If you get what I mean here.

We have, at the office, an equipment inventory system called eAMT (Asset Management Tool; the meaning of the “e” is left as an exercise for the reader). When you ask eAMT to show you your assets, it fails to list the really important ones (honest, smart, strong yet gentle), but instead shows the PCs that you “own” (of course, the company really owns them, so I am just the person who has to make sure they don’t go missing).

Apart from my laptop, I own five, which are server machines for various purposes. In order to keep track of which server is which, I have put, in eAMT, in the “comments” field, the name that I use for each server.

When I get the list of assets, eAMT shows me the model and serial number of each machine, along with, for each machine, the name, employee number, and department number of the owner (me), and the building number where the machine resides (mine).

You can see, gentle reader, where this is going, I know you can. You would not have programmed it this way.

It does not show me the “comments” field.

I have to select each machine, one at a time, to get its detail record, in order to see whether that is the machine I need to futz with. And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that selecting each machine and looking at the detail record... takes a couple of clicks and a while of waiting. The system is not quick.

Now, let’s see... where are my pliers?