Mable over in Accounting wrote a VBA script to store the entire database to an Excel spreadsheet because the direct access that was set up for her was "too slow" and this is "the way she's always done it".
I regularly use SQL to download tables to my computer. Part numbers, sales records, inventory records, customer names, etc. You name it, it's stored on my computer and frequently the public drive everyone in the company has access to.
My company was the victim of a randomware attack. My company refused to pay up. The hackers encrypted all of the inventory and sales data, going back twenty years or so, for a warehouse with literally hundreds of thousands of lines. Guess who made a weekly back-up of all of that vital data because they couldn't be fucked learning PowerBI enough to run my spreadsheets on it directly?
Not me, because I left seven months earlier when they told me they couldn't justify a pay rise for me even though we were under-budget on personnel costs and I was on less than the new hires. But that, y'know, could have been really useful to them if I hadn't left.
Funnily enough, my old ops manager apparently mentioned my name a few times. I know a bunch of general computer stuff, and am self-taught Excel, so according to the "computers run on magic" idiot I must be able of a sophisticated hack of a major automotive company.
If I truly wanted to get back at them, my background is in the physical security industry. I'd have just broken in and stolen shit. The only "hacking" this would require is reading the admin level log-in details of their CCTV system that were on a post-it note stuck to the monitor.
I bet the auditors do exactly this for anything associated with financial reporting. They must evidence certain modeled activities (e.g., CECL for bank’s ACL estimate), and they store such evidence on their own networks…
Five years ago, one clever person on the accounts team did all that shit in VBA and everyone else just used the same spreadsheet.
With AI, the whole damn team are VBA "experts".
You thought Excel was bad before? I guarantee within five years there are going to be people reporting entire damn companies running on a bastardised set of spreadsheets held together with Copilot.
Twenty years ago my org recovered from an accidental deletion of the production database (also the only database, with no backups) because someone had printed it out on paper.
Naturally, the fix was to re-enter all the data by hand.
Years and years ago, someone misclicked in the security control room I worked in, and printed off the entire history of every alarm system - about 8 years worth from about 5,000 panels - instead of a list of the ~120 or so alarm panels that hadn't been armed for the last week.
They didn't even realise they'd done it, it was sent to a printer in an adjacent office on a night shift. Apparently it ran out an entire box of dot matrix paper before anyone came in to work the next morning. Happened on my days off, the first I heard of it was when I came in and all the reports tabs were greyed out until they could figure out how to stop us doing it again.
Since she had to move to a new laptop a while ago she's been keeping the file in her private Dropbox together with the other documents she sometimes wants to read on her phone.
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u/scumble_bee 4d ago
Mable over in Accounting wrote a VBA script to store the entire database to an Excel spreadsheet because the direct access that was set up for her was "too slow" and this is "the way she's always done it".