Oh the joys of electronic effeciency

So the other day I decided to check and see if my leave request at work that will let me go to the family reunion was approved. Not too long ago they updated the entire leave process. It used to be you filled out a little piece of paper and somebody got back to you fairly quickly. Now there is an electronic form to fill out and if you dig deep enough you can even find separate policies for if you request medical leave to donate a kidney vs needing to you name it. In any case, this form is supposed to email my manager when its filled out so they know to make a decision.

I filled out the original electronic request in February. I kept asking my manager about it but she said don't worry your not planning on using this for a couple months so it doesn't matter if we take forever getting to it.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. The request sat in limbo for so long because nobody wanted to look at it it that it was finally declared "case closed" with "decision pending" because some genius who never asked me decided I had "submitted in error". I pointed this out to my manager, who all these months later still needed coaching from me on how to locate my request in the electronic system. Ok I admit the electronic system is stupid, you have to know the status of a request before you can find it first try which leads managers to think, "oh, it must not be here yet". If you don't know the status you just look everywhere and eventually find it.

So now at my managers instruction I've submitted another request and she said the site leader promised to approve it immediately. Been a couple days... and I continue to rejoice in the efficiency of the electronic era where they probably forgot about my last request because our email accounts automatically purge emails for being "too old".