IT's biggest worry--employee blunders

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Excuse me?

I hope you aren't implying that I made up my quotes...

You obviously don't work anywhere near my company, so I don't think you have a clue as to what really happens at my sites.

For a world-wide corporation, we only have 85 field technicians. We are responsible for hundreds of sites (including remotes) and in most cases, there are no back-up personnel. We maintain the networks, install and repair equipment, do all the updates and patches, act as security POCs (for e-mail, application accesses, etc.), and somewhere in all this, still are required to hand-hold all the users.

I get calls at 5 in the morning on my days off to reset a password so that the user can look up a report, only to get called two hours later because that same person suspended his/her account again.

When I go on vacation (a rarity and only for a week or so. We don't get the lovely month or more the French get and we work longer hours.), I get called on my personal cell for what can only be called dumb things. (FYI-there IS a central help center for resetting network passwords and similar tasks, but no one calls them, despite my sending out monthly notices on procedure.)

Incompetent is not a nice thing to call people who are doing the best they can with limited resources and increasing demands on the infrastructure.

I still have the HD of the woman who refused to back up her files. It has a corrupted master FAT and all the data is gone, even though the physical drive may be recoverable. She refused to believe that and insisted that our company pay for an outside tech to look at it. He told her the same thing I did and we had to pay for his time. I have the e-mail trail on that incident because there are so many people like you who refuse to believe that there are people like that employee.

Responsible, competent IT directors DO see these reports all the time here, but we don't lie to our bosses to make it seem like all is perfect when we know it isn't. Lying just gets the budget cut because the higher-ups would get the mistaken notion that there is no need for upgrading or training.

You need to pop over to a real working office and deal with my little corner of H3ll. Burnt out, as someone put it? Certainly over-worked and underpaid. And no where to go because the jobs are being outsourced to India for the cheaper labor. Even your cushy job in Paris is not as secure as it once was. Competence won't save you.

BTW-since my original post, I received three calls over the weekend to assist users with resetting expired passwords. These are not new personnel. They are long-time employees that refuse to embrace the new technology and know that IT has to deal with them anyway.

Oh, and one call about trying to print a 10MB PDF file to the wrong print server: the user didn't wait for the graphics-heavy file to spool and did the ol' resend thing six times, which locked up the printer. Thank heavens for remote access!

Posted by: AbsolutelyNot   Posted on: 10/19/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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