IT News Blog

July 1st. Banner (Finance) Goes Live. Waldo isn’t quite deceased (Project Evolution is a three-year affair) but we’ve gathered here to wish him the best. This is a place to bid him farewell, commemorate his useful life, or gleefully dance to his demise.

I imagine that for those of us who have worked at Emerson for only a few years or even more recently – I’m thinking of a generation of workers who grew up with the Web – Waldo is the cranky, fastidious, antiquated eighty-something grandpa who travels around town in his beat up Buick, and YOU have been asked to adopt him. You weren’t given any instructions on how to manage him (no user guides, just barebones log on info when your predecessor left); you never knew when he was going to flare up and crash (when you had just put in two hours of data-entry time); or how he could be so ungrateful for all your meticulous work and reciprocate nothing (when you followed instructions perfectly for a laborious PDQ/CSVWriter query, you end up with a blank report).

For some of us who have been here for ten years or longer (we shan’t name any names), we have figured him inside out, and gotten used to his mean old ways. We painstakingly, through trial and error, learned the unintuitive keystrokes, quirky field names and commands, and stumbled upon roundabout shortcuts to extract the data we wanted out of him. By chance, I discovered how to look up a PO from the Budget menu (if you weren’t shown that – too bad, it’s too late). Sometimes when you’ve been in someone’s company for so long, in good times and bad, it’s with mixed emotions you say, “Adios, guy.”

Well, Grandpa Waldo, that time has almost come. It’s simply not working out. I regret to inform you that the antediluvian, archaic, obsolete, outdated ways of yours have got to go. We are moving on to something more “in” with the times, something that fits our needs and measures up to our expectations. We’ll miss you. Or maybe not so much.