I have been at my current workplace for going on 3 years. I hate when one of our customers changes how our invoicing process is done. Because I've been here so long, no one is quite as willing to help me as they were in the beginning. I'm left to figure out this stuff all by my lonesome and it scares me to death.

Right now one of our biggest customers (who shall remain nameless because it's a well-known name) has decided that rather than having us create paper invoices, they want to have us use their very complicated timesheet system.

Each employee of ours who is doing work for them has their own username and password. But they're not the ones who will be entering their time. I will be the one doing that. I think that legally I'm not supposed to. At least that's the impression I get from that darn website that makes a really simple task relatively difficult.

None of the usernames make any sense. They're all random letters that have no relation to one another. The passwords were just as bad. What made it worse is that each username was sent in a separate e-mail and each password was sent in a separate e-mail.

14 e-mails. No idea which username goes with with password or which employee.

The log-in system will only give you 3 tries to get the combination correct before it locks you out.

So we called around to see if there's any rhyme or reason to these e-mails. As it turns out, we were supposed to match up the times that the e-mails were sent. That made sense and it worked.

After I logged in for the first time, it asked for a new password. I made all the passwords the same just to make my job easier.

Next, it took me to a menu page where it asked me to complete an infomation form about each individual. Keep in mind that I had to do all of this 7 times.

I knew all of the infomation like work phone number, fax number, e-mail address, company address, etc.

What got me were the 3 mandatory security questions. They weren't the standard questions like: "What are the last 4 digits of your social security number?" or "What is your mother's maiden name?"

Instead, here are a couple examples:

"If I could be anybody for a day it would be..."
"When I retire, I will live in..."
"My dog's name is..."
"My favorite actor's last name is..."
"My favorite hobby is..."
"My favorite cousin's first name is..."
"My all time favorite movie..."
"The name of the nastiest drill sargeant when I was in the military was..."

I just made up answers. I'm the only one who'll be logging in to these accounts, so why should I have to go research all of these answers? The worst part is the fact that if I ever need to get into these accounts in a couple of years and I forget my password, there's no way I'll remember the answers to those questions, even if it was my own account. Those answers can change within a couple hours after you made them.

I was smart enough to write everything down.

Now I'm just trying to figure out the different codes that need to be entered before I can save the time that I just put in. I've contacted two people. Hopefully they can give me the answers.

We desperately need the money, so all of these issues are keeping us from getting paid.

It's really annoying.

Ugh.

In other news, I think I have IBS-C. But that's another story for another day.

I'm done complaining now.

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