SAP is evil

The German people are a good people. Reparations have been made for past mistakes, their biscuits and beer are excellent, I believe they have some beautiful landscapes though I have never seen them, and it is difficult to dispute the quality of their automotive engineering. I do however still blame the Germans for the most miserable experience it is possible to have, at least within the safe confines of the office environment.

SAP.

I wasn’t shouting, that was an acronym. It means, for the benefit of you lucky bastards who have never touched it, System – Application – Product. That’s the English translation, the original German is Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte.

Sorry, that should read

SCHNELL! SCHNELL! SYSTEME, ANWENDUNGEN UND PRODUKTE!! BLÖDES ARSCHLOCH! DRECKSAU, FICH DICH! RAUS! RRRAUS!

Now, Microsoft Office is bad. Writing a document, putting together a presentation or creating a spreadsheet has long been a process involving attempting to string together an intelligible set of information while simultaneously trying to outguess a program that, like a consultant, thinks it is cleverer than you and tries all kinds of clever new things while in fact being a moron.

Windows is also bad. You’ve been typing for thirty seconds, an essential passage of text never to be repeated, a revelatory and unforgettable thing, when you look up at the screen and realise that in fact a pop up window came up at some point to do with an application crashing, asked you a question, and your continuing unaware keystrokes not only told the computer to close the application but also to open a new document, restart the computer, delete all of your photos and send a mildly insulting email to a close relative. Plus your amazing passage has been deleted.

SAP is so bad, it sucks before you even start using it. You get an online training application which you must go through before you get access to the real application. It walks you through various transactions (SAP is supposedly all about streamlining business information by providing a single place to enter salary details, timesheets, expenses and purchases by the way). When it walks you through these transactions you get to sit in front of your computer screen like a spectator at the dullest sporting event ever, watching the cursor move around between various buttons at the speed of an arthritic pensioner with narcolepsy.

Then there are the buttons. Let’s try a quick quiz now, what do these buttons do?

Apart from maybe the books with the magnifying glass, I assume they’re all quite familiar. That’s as much as anything because the icons are reasonably consistent across most of the programs you use. SAP has news for you – you don’t know any of the buttons. The buttons are all different. All button-related bets are off. Consider yourself a button idiot.

Right, one might be to do with printing something, and another is maybe for help, the question mark gives it away. The others? Go back, launch rocket, cancel launching rocket, use binoculars, use binoculars in church, paper up, paper down, exploding window, moving window, colour TV with shopping list. I think. But SAP doesn’t care about you being a button idiot, because SAP is all about doing things the way SAP does things, not the way you think they should be done. Like with nice buttons.

It is at this point that I will abandon this post as I have to try and work out how to use SAP to reclaim travelling expenses. It is also at this point that I miss most the time I worked in York Camera Mart and getting paid was a simple matter involving no SAP and no timesheets, and the only reason you didn’t get paid was because the boss’s wife forgot to go to the bank on a Friday afternoon, not because a tyrannical German application made getting paid a challenge worthy of Hercules.

One day years ago somebody may have said, maybe on Tomorrow’s World, that software could save time and effort and streamline work, freeing people from tiresome paperwork and allowing them to lead stress-free lives.

Horseshit.