Posted from: South Carolina

Supporter of narrative causality that I am, I find it soothingly romantic to imagine that Hell is a tailor-made experience. Covet enough of your neighbor’s Ikea bookshelves, and when you die, the cosmos will reach into the remains of your consciousness, pluck out your greatest fear, and bam, you’re locked in a closet with Tom Cruise for all eternity.

Guess it’s a good thing I don’t believe in Hell, because based on my own logic and the sheer number of times I’ve spent Sunday reading The Onion, I’ll be uploading CSVs to Netsuite until the universe collapses.

Netsuite, for those of you who are still blissfully unaware, can be described as a giant, Cthulu-esque ecommerce platform, graced with enough tentacles to integrate warehousing and distribution, product development, management, accounting, and the front-end webstore.

To be fair, the webstore, and thus the products assigned to it, is really the only part of Netsuite that I have anything to do with. I get the impression that the webstore area was a tacked-on afterthought that has since grown, and I can promise you that Netsuite corporate either didn’t talk to, or didn’t listen to, any good usability guys while building it. So it’s possible that the warehousing and financial areas of the system are screamingly stellar, and it’s just the webstore part that makes me want to break my own fingers.

Like with so many of the truly evil influences in my life, I have a love-hate relationship with Netsuite. When one of my clients opted to buy Netsuite’s Gold Support option, I discovered that the NS guys were so on the ball, I had to resist the urge to ask them for relationship advice and stock tips. One of their Indian support reps actually wrote me a Javascript function off the top of his head that not only solved the problem I was calling about, but several other issues besides, and which, I’m sure, would have produced cold fusion if I’d passed it the right arguments. And that wasn’t an isolated incident.

On the other hand, well… allow me to demonstrate with a real-life example:

The problem: 450 images were uploaded to the Netsuite images folder with the wrong name. I need to delete them, and re-upload them with the correct name.

Easy-peasy. I’ll just search the file cabinet for the wayward images and delete the returned results. Here are the results now:

Wait, what? There’s NO MASS DELETE OPTION FOR RETURNED SEARCH RESULTS?

In fact, there’s no delete option on this screen at all. The only way to delete from a returned search is to click “Edit” for each file, then click here:

At which point you’re not returned to the search results, you’re returned to the File Cabinet screen:

… which a) erases your search results and b) tantalizes you with a giant “Delete Files” button, which, being the spawn of the devil, takes you to another screen, where file cabinet images are not sortable by any kind of criteria, and on which page NO FILE PATH IS SHOWN, making it completely IMPOSSIBLE to know whether or not you’re even deleting the right item from the right place and <hysteria> oh god oh god oh god you already have a checkbox on the file cabinet screen! Just add another checkbox! All the pieces are there! Just ONE MORE CHECKBOX! AND I CAN CLICK IT AND DELETE THINGS! RIGHT FROM HERE! WITHOUT GOING ANYWHERE!</hysteria>

*ahem*

That’s right – 5 clicks to delete each item. 450 items. 3 unbillable hours. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have case of carpal tunnel to cultivate.