Well, in the realm of things I didn't anticipate and can't believe I have to deal with, I need to prove that I have my vaccinations. I'm not sure if it's a university policy or an actual state law, but every student has to show some form of documentation that they've received vaccines for measles, mumps, and all the rest of the gang.
I received this message, which I first thought was a phishing scam:
As a 47 year old, one would think that is an impossible task, but my parents to the rescue: they saved my vaccination documentation from when I was a kid:
So I logged into the site. The tool that's used for this is absolutely trash. It's completely bananas.
I tried to navigate the site, which looks like this:
None of it really worked, and my patience with shit software is pretty low, so I sent a message asking for help, and I received this:
This old dog has been around the block enough to know that it's 99.9999% likely that the message was written by an offshore third-party "helpdesk", with the intention of a) avoiding any actual work and b) closing tickets as soon as possible.
There's a "helpful" 26 page document on how to use the tool, with instructions like this:
I did some Nancy Drew work. The tool is made by "Point and Click Solutions", which appears to have elbowed its way into "350+ university sites." LinkedIn shows that company has 50-200 employees, with most people in the US, and with some engineers in Nigeria, Moscow, Botswana, and Malaysia. It appears that the majority of their work is ensuring HIPAA compliance, data security (SOC2), and so-on. I couldn't find the specific contract for UC, but I found their RFP responses to other universities, and it seems like the thing costs $40k/year. You get what you pay for?
I just missed their annual user group meeting at the MGM Grand, which was in June; the cost was just $1490 per person. Maybe next year.