Users...

And no, I don't mean the types of users who are using drugs, etc. I'm talking about information technology and those types of users. The ones who are sitting hammering away at their keyboards and working on applications that we, as IT professionals, have worked so hard to provide for them.

The worst type of user is, ironically, the kind that I have in abundance - and that's the user who simply doesn't get it. Call them technophobes, Luddites, clueless, etc. It all fits.

Case in point: A while back, it was asked of me that I archive one of our main tables in the database I work on. So I did. Now, at the time, that table contained a number of monetary totals in it and was very useful. Soon after that, the totals were moved OUT of that table and into another table so that there could be year-by-year totals put into it and one record from table 1 could have multiple records in table 2.

My concern here was that the new table would not be usable with the archived table because past totals might be changed. I was assured by users who (I feel) simply didn't want to deal with my problem that such a change would never happen.

Now, I'm getting flak because reports run against the archived table no longer have the same totals as they did for previous runs... BECAUSE the date-related totals table was in fact changed.

And this is just one example. I could go on for hours. But suffice to say that I am quickly getting fed up with users who won't give me the attention I need to create THEIR application, but then get upset with me when their application doesn't work as they want. Sigh...

Wonder how much ditch-diggers make...