Subject: IT at work

is it just this office or is everyone's IT completely rubbish?!

Our "IS" department is offshore (we have IT guys in our offices but getting hold of them is impossible) and it is the most ridiculous and unhelpful department imaginable.

You would expect a FTSE 100 company to handle it better, but it's easily the most frustrating thing about working for my employer.

I'm our IT department. Well, me and Chris, I make tea and try to motivate him and he does the harder programming work when he can be arsed. We hardly ever change anything, so very few things break. When things do break, we fix them. People seem quite happy about this.

This isn't the known way to operate in the IT fraternity though is it?

My manager volunteered for my PC to be used to deploy a version of Java as a test so it could be rolled out company wide with any hitches. this broke an Excel database that i use daily, fundamental to my work.

I was then asked to spend a week testing a similar deployment on another PC which resulted in me doing minimal work but being involved in conference calls where different people would just bitch about each other.

I knew from the first day that after the week of testing and it being rolled to all PC's at the weekend that the application they previously broke on my PC still wouldn't work.

I was right.

Can't all IT people be like you, and maybe from Norwich.

Tricky one that, it depends almost entirely on how you feel about progress. Eventually the computers and systems we have here will need updating, and at that precise point, I'll get found out :)...

Darn.


Glue the boxes shut so they don't know what's inside? Will that foil people in Norwich?

At this point I will however moan about an IT department I used to work in, which had a perfectly functional system for taking phone calls, written in something obscure, and which used old fashioned unix, with black and white terminal emulations. The department boss in question decided to replace it with a multi-million pound oracle development, probably because the bloke he was playing golf with that summer told him how wonderful Oracle was. Several years and a stupid amount of money later, the Oracle system had been deployed to one customer only. To this knowledge to this day, no-one has been brave enough to relocate another customer off the old system onto the new one. The Oracle system looked very nice, but it's a call centre ! All the operators needed to do was ask a question, type in the answer, and read the next question - you don't need anything better than a black and white screen with text on it to do that. Total waste of money.

but when the old boxes stop working, it doesn't matter what's in them. What matters is whether the new boxes you replace the old boxes with will do exactly the same thing, i.e. run an old VB application, use mail, and surf the internet, in reverse priority order.

yes. always. it is the law.

anyone that knows anything about computers will never do IT.

and what is with this "i'll tell you what to do over the phone" crap? if my dishwasher breaks down i don't expect the engineer to be on the phone saying "right, you need a monkey wrench and a philips, now look behind the panel..." get off your arses and come here and fix it!

we don't do that here, in fact the whole office is in a room about 20 feet by 15 feet.

it is because they are cocks. simples.