Back on the trains today after my driving sojourn yesterday. The train is near empty today as its school holidays. Whilst there are not many school kids on my train I guess a lot of people take annual leave around this time of year.
Today my posting is not with the trains (despite them being 7 minutes late this morning) but rather IT Help Desk people. You know the type. Young person, aged 22-28, probably does No-Doze to stay awake after sitting up all night playing World of Warcraft or something similar and probably has some body piercing somewhere on their body under their corporate attire to make them think that they’re “bucking the system”. I think this job spec describes most Help Desk people at your place of work too…
(sidebar – they just announced that the aircon in carriages 3 and 4 is not working and if customers are uncomfortable, they should move. I am in carriage 8 and the aircon is on and set to “cold” despite it being less than 5 degrees outside. I may move TO carriage 4!)
Anyway, help desk… These are the people who you ring after 30 minutes of frustration and they tell you lines like “Have you tried rebooting?” They continually amaze me in all my working life, no matter where I have worked (and its been a few places) the Help Desk person always assumes that the person they are dealing with (i.e. me) is an idiot and struggles to turn on the PC each morning. Now I know some of the more geriatric executive management of a company may find a PC as useful as a paper weight, but for most people my age and younger (and there’s a lot more of them every year) PC’s are not one of life’s great mysteries and we do know some basics of registry editing and configuring a PC for optimum performance.
Well at my work recently, the PC’s in my department have all decided to have a hissy fit for the past 6 months (yes months!) and continuously crash, freeze for 30 second periods as you move a 2kb email file to a folder or will basically determine for itself that 20minutes is a reasonable amount of time to take to login to the network in the morning. The Help Desk people (and there have been many over 6 months) have all attempted to hoist the blame for these issues onto the humble PC or its user. I have had this laptop upgraded and rebuilt 5 times in my 3 year period of employment because of my perception (and I use the word perception because I know the smarmy Help Desk people think I am being unreasonable) and I now run 512MB of RAM when the “standard build” is 256MB. I am a desk jockey and use MS Office, web and email, so I don’t need a high end machine so this should be more than adequate.
At the same time, my colleagues in my department have been experiencing similar problems. They too have crashes (one guy’s crashes every 2 hours – that’s 4-5 times a day) and yet each time the Help Desk say it’s a PC problem. They too have gone through the Help Desk rigmarole and one guy is currently running over a Gig of RAM because he cant open 2 page word docs?? For me though, Help Desk give me little credence because I run Firefox. Yes, the humble fact that I run Firefox as a web browser instead of IE means that ALL my problems are caused by Firefox. For example, my CPU with nothing running other than the network and Task Manager was spinning at 100% usage for 15mins. I rebooted and still it shot to 100% and stayed there. As a result, the smallest of tasks took ages. I took a screen dump of my screen showing NOTHING on my taskbar and the CPU clock running at 100% and sent a polite email that contained the phrase “what the fuck” in the subject line to the Help Desk manager. His response – I see you have a Firefox icon on your desktop, I suggest you uninstall Firefox and any other non-standard software and this should correct your issue. ????? a) the thing wasn’t even running and b) that’s bullshit!
Yet we are made to feel inferior in the light of the Help Desk and their anal manager because “we users” are nothing but idiots.
The reason though humble reader for this rant is that my colleagues and I have been vindicated. We finally got Help Desk to check the network and they called in our external data comms provider to “check the cabling” and they found lo and behold that there was a “major fault” in the cabling between my floor and the data centre on another floor that would have been the cause of serious network issues. So serious this fault is that when it was discovered on Friday, they got the work to rectify it done that night. They spent the weekend rewiring my floor I am happy to report that yesterday saw me work in a “freeze and crash” free environment for the first time in at least 6 months.
3 comments:
HAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHA!
So ironic...
I actually wrote a small blurb from the other side of the fence on IT on my personal blog today Clay that you're bound to find most amusing ;) (http://dmsworld.blogspot.com/) although I do specify that it's the people without basic knowledge who call me with attitude are the ones that give me the shits. ;)
The thing with IT Helpdesks is that it's not deemed an essential resource to many businesses, in so far as much as the fact it's actually expensive to have IT support for any company and as such, it's mostly staffed by people who lack experience or are the first to get booted when a company has a shuffle. IT Support guys are (as you guessed) often populated by young blokes with a mobile on one hip and a six shooter on the other, but that's because the industry demands that kind of player in the market. IT is a very unstable industry that pays like shit, with managers who treat them like shit. They more often see them as an expensive commodity they have to have until they need to tighten the belts and then piss the people off - it's hardly any wonder helpdesks in Aus lack people with solid credentials. Older people usually move into different careers because they want something more stable. Young blokes raised on PC games make good candidates until they realise the truth about the industry and move on. At 31, I'm actually an 'old hand' in my local Helpdesk... go figure ;)
That said, the reason why they picked on Firefox I'd wager is because your office operates under an SOE (Standard Operating Environment). It's actually been proven through study that the 'tinkerers' - the guys who say they know a thing or two about PCs and like to play around with their setups (even minor changes) - actually cause the *most* problems and costs for IT Support for any business which is why the IT guys are usually quick to put the blame in your court.
Then of course... we all have to battle with fabulously stable and secure software from Microsoft... and that in itself lends it's own issues.
Dealing with Helpdesk can suck at times I agree, but I can say from the other side of the fence it's not easy for them either. For every valid issue we have to deal with, we have 10 people who call because they can't clean a fucking mouse and we're bastards because we haven't dropped everything at a moment's notice to tell them what they should already know.
It's amazing that people can see why you need a licence to drive a car before you get behind the wheel, but for some reason think you can 'wing it' when you get a PC.
Hee Hee!
I didnt know one of my readers was a HelpDesker! LOL!
Thanks DM! But you're wrong re my work - we dont have an SOE! The company (who i wont shame) has very little regard for IT.
SOme people here still run on Win95 would you believe!!
That would explain why you have so many problems then. A company that employs ITIL and operates with an SOE is going to have a lot less problems... shit, if your guys are so cheap they won't even leave behind Win95... then yer farked quite frankly ;)
But if you want a little 'inside gossip' on what the hell actually goes on with a helpdesk, lemme know.
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