WINDOWS + HR: A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN!
At work, the HR department is a great fan of using The Computer to manage all parts of our work misery. One of the ways they use The Computer to make my personal work experience that much more unpleasant is that they send out a constant stream of work policy updates, all of which require some sort of acknowledgement, and not just a legal acknowledgement, but going to a website and clicking a [confirm] button so that the record of the new policy being read can go directly into the MS SQL Server database without bothering the beautiful minds of any of the wonderful people in HR.
This is pretty annoying to start with -- there's nothing to make you feel like a faceless cog than having a constant stream of email from HR (from an email address that HR doesn't bother to read) telling you (sometime under threat of termination), that you have to go to some stupid website to click a button for their database -- but it gets better when your MS Windows IT department carefully writes their database applications so that you can't click the button, even if you're using Microsoft Big-Bag-O-Security-Violations on Microsoft "operating" systems (the, need I bother to add, official workstation environment for my company, nevermind the trivial detail that we're the Unix branch of the company) and then manages to drop the record of my successfully clicking on the stupid button (after a fairly long search for a WINDOWS computer running a WINDOWS web browser that would let me click the dumb button) for one of these critically important (but not important enough to do on paper) policy enhancements.
Grrr. Stupid stupid HR department. Is "drive the developers completely batshit insane" part of their job description, or are they simply doing it as part of their bonus plan?
(h/t to Dooce, for doing the web-based scream of frustration first.)