- "Megane tribute kit"
- "struggling tiptoes her buttocks"
On the serious side, I'm starting to gear up towards the first revalation, which will better define one of the angles that this blog will be about. It will attract some support, and some rebuttal, for sure, but I think I'm ready to go that extra step. I think that when I get to revalation three, the anonymity bit will be understood, as will some of the links. It is just going to take a bit of time to get there.
In the mean time, I'll start documenting a few things about my current job ... IT.
For those of you who have been watching, "The IT Crowd," lately I have to admit that it is tame in comparison to the real thing. When you work in I.T., "lunch," is an opportune time to liberate the computers of people who aren't in the office; the machines that have become so battle weary that they have to be returned to the IT lab for some tender loving care. "Home time," typically occurs after seven pm as some stuff can't be done on the servers and network structure until everyone else has gone home and stopped using the system. "Life," is what other people have, and IT crews read about on The Register, BBC News and other such sites during the day when we've run out of things to do while people are using their computers.
Take our set up; [deep breath] we are supporting a wide number of different operating systems and a vast number of systems on the, "back office." Unix, Novell, Microsoft servers, Linux, the whole gamut is going on. Add to that Windows 98, NT, 2000 and XP on the desktops and the communication and routing systems of presenting web services to the public as well as the configuration and deployment of a steady stream of new equipment and you can see the overload of specialised information that the staff have got to know about. [phew]
... and then someone logs a call to find out how to "bold" a set of characters in Excel and puts it on a four hour priority.
"Neeeaaarrrrggggghhhhhh," is close to the word I would use. It is about that time when IT staff start frothing at the mouth, shaking bodily and muttering something incomprehensable about the, "help," option in the application menu.
Seriously, no major company seems to train its staff in I.T. A new, "body," is suitably recruited by Human Remains, plonked down in front of a computer, given a logon ID and password and left to their own devices. These are technically complicated systems, and HR has just given some untrained newbie who probably professed to knowing something about word processing on their CV, the very means to start poking around the system, with no knowledge of how anything is set up. And then people wonder why IT staff come to work in combats and a tin hat, carrying machine guns. It's war; people. IT get it from both sides; protecting against intentional hackers on the outside and unintentional hackers on the inside.
Then we have the dreaded helpdesk system. Specifically tuned to produce reams of useless statistics for management so that they can see if they are getting value for money out of their ITdepartment. I say, up the management logon privilages, give them the tools, and see how they cope with a user base that logs a four hour support call, and five minutes later, when the call is assigned to someone, we give them a call to find out that they've gone home early for the day.
You see, one of the famous things that I.T. staff will ask is, "Show me what you were doing at the time it went wrong," translated that is, "What did you do that broke the system." Now this may be a revalation to some people, but we ain't long distance mind readers folks!
The other thing we have is that people complain that IT are behind locked doors which they can't access. Funny that, ain't it! It's to prevent you from getting in and giving us an ear bashing about your faulty mouse call that you logged on a one hour priority, while we're battling with minor things like a server outage. Also, when there are tools open on our screens that could wipe out the network with one or two wrong mouse clicks, do we really want people wandering in to the room who don't know how to bold a set of characters in Excel? Just be grateful that the doors to IT aren't sandbagged and supported by anti-aircraft turrets.
Trust us; if we could hook up automatic machine gun systems that blasted everyone that didn't know the micron width of the optical backbone, we would!
2 comments:
You mean to say that during "Lunch" you don't play multi-player 1st person shoot-em-ups on the corporate LAN? Your actually working? Surely not.
At least your IT department is still located in this country. We have to dial a number that takes us to a large room in a foreign land. All the support technicians have heavy ethnic accents yet have very English names like John Smith. They even know whats happened in the latest episode of Eastenders!! The only help they end up giving us is directing a local just-out-of-school youth to our desktop just to tell us what we already knew... it doesn't work. grrr
Hi Lennie,
Oh no, we can't play games at this employer; we'd get fired. Apart from which, the computers we're working on couldn't hack it. Possibly Doom from back in 1995, but that would be about it.
Funny you should post about phone services abroad, just as I'm posting about similar. I've worked for a few international companies, and was in an office in Germany, but the staff had to log a call with the helpdesk in Irelend, who then passed the call to my desk and then I nipped round the office and sorted the problem. Nine times out of ten, I'd sort the problem and then they'd log the call; all the happier to do it because their problem was solved. But it did generate a lot of tension.
Post a Comment