And a new twist on Sinclair . . .
Yesterday I did two Sinclair shops and hurried home to get them in before heading out to do the rest of the day's shops. Of course start with the one done first and it took f..o...r..e..ve..r with some kind of scripting error throwing up prompt screens of whether I wanted to stop the scripts or continue. By the time all the prompts stopped and I had the information in, I could see that some words had run together and some had multiple spaces between, but each time I tried repositioning the cursor I got the prompt screen again. I finished and could still see some odd characters that consisted of small 00 over 01 between straight vertical lines. I sent the report and emailed the scheduler to both report the problem and to ask that she make sure that the report actually went through, with apologies if spacing was scrambled.
Sign out, get a fresh cup of coffee, scan my receipt and sign in to do shop #2. No scripting errors this time!!! Get to the bottom of the page and hit "Save and Continue". The report throws me back to the same page with complaints about missing questions as all of my narratives typed in place have disappeared. I used the back button and salvaged my narratives to Word, signed out and signed in again, returned to the report, pasted in my narratives and refilled all the check boxes, hit "Save and Continue" and I get an error screen that will let me go no further. Copy/paste and let my scheduler know I will try the report later in the evening.
After putting in the rest of the day's shops I returned to the Sinclair report and this time as soon as I try to open the report I have a 2 page error message. I made a pdf of the message and emailed it to my scheduler. So I followed the alternative instructions, printed the form and filled it out by hand to fax it. Somewhere around midnight I tried to fax and the first time got "Comm error" on my fax, second time got "phone did not pick up", third time the fax connects, but sits on transmitting page 1 for more than 30 minutes. I killed the job and went to bed after another note to the scheduler.
This morning the 2 page error message was still there when I tried to do the report. I left to do jobs and in my absence the scheduler called. When I got home I returned the call, but got his voice mail. Tried to enter the report again and got a message that the report was "locked" but I could 'click here' and unlock it. To my amazement, the check boxes were intact and the narrative was present but preceded by a whole lot of garbage about wrong fonts and yadda yadda yadda. So I tidied it up with fresh copy and paste from my Word document and got the form to submit. It went through. Tried to upload my receipt and got a fresh batch of error messages.
Now considering I was putting in reports for other companies all night, checking emails and websites, I'm pretty darn sure it wasn't me.
I did get a call back from the scheduler indicating that their IT department said that the problem was because I was cutting and pasting from Word. Apparently you cannot/should not do that with Sinclair. Hmmm, been doing that with Sinclair for years. And of course the initial problems yesterday with the first form were from trying to type narrative in place and on the second form I resorted to cut and paste only when the report blew out my narratives.
So, for the record, don't cut and paste into Sinclair's forms. Evidently the system is just to primitive to cope with it.