Saturday, April 26, 2008

I.T.

So this week once again I have been living in I.T. Hell. You know most companies have an actual in-house IT dept that is usually managed by a reasonably intelligent person and will respond immediately to IT problems. Other companies are actually blessed not only to have an actual IT dept but also have additional people or a person on site who is intelligent enough to handle the lesser problems (thanks Matthew and Richard). Well not at my company, we have neither despite what one individual believes. Thus when we have IT problems we have to either wait for the next contracted visit, which currently takes place every two weeks, or we open a service ticket with the contract third-party (who tends to take their sweet time to answer the problem). Not to mention trying to get the service ticket open in the first place is about as bad as trying to pass the security check process get into to see the White House. Most times when I have a problem I have my beloved husband fix it!


So here it goes, if you will remember my work computers both crashed a couple months ago and had to be replaced with new ones. (Yeah me!) So a couple of weeks ago during our last contracted visit I asked the IT rep "shouldn't my laptop have anti-virus software?". To which he replied: "Yes, I loaded Symantec Anti-Virus". So when I got home that night I confirmed once again that there wasn't any such software on my computer. I then sent an email to the appropriate individual at my office stating that I needed to have anti-virus added to my laptop. The response was something like this..."Do you need that right now? It is really expensive to open a service ticket when we can wait two weeks for our next scheduled visit." Now I had to sit there a minute and think. (Hmmm, this is a company computer that is used on a daily basis and is frequently on the Internet. Can we really afford to wait to add anti-virus software?) So I replied, "Well you decide what you believe is appropriate at this time. It just needs to be done." Yep you guess it, I had to wait 2 weeks.


So fast forward to this week, Tuesdays are the days that we are scheduled to be visited by our IT rep. He usually arrives sometime around 9:00 a.m. and is gone by 12:00 noon. Well the morning flew by and I had realized that he had not made it to our office yet. So I called the individual in charge of our IT rep's action list to confirm that he was still coming. The response went something like this: "Yes your task is on the list however he won't get to it today and will try to call you and fix it remotely." As you can imagine I wasn't very thrilled with this idea especially since I had already waited for two weeks and was told it was too expensive to open a service ticket. I began to wonder, how come its okay for him to work on it remotely today but not two weeks ago! Mind you, when we were having this discussion it was 11:15 a.m. and the reason I was asking is that I was going to be away from my office and thus my laptop, to meet with a visiting customer. I got a little miffed and I guess it showed in my response, "What do you mean he won't take care of it today? This has gone on for too long as it is. It is not a smart thing to have a company computer in use without anti-virus software on it. This is for our company's protection. It would be my recommendation, that before he leaves in the next 45 minutes he finishes this task!" Well I guess this worked because the software was installed before he left.


Then came the next problem. I tried to log into it before leaving for the day and couldn't. The system didn't recognize my user name and password or the domain I was trying to log into wasn't available. WHAT THE HECK.... I tried several times before calling to the main office to complain. Which in the end didn't help because the person in charge of the IT issues had left for the day and the backup no longer had access to call the IT rep or open a service ticket. Again WHAT THE HECK... I eventually gave up, turn the computer off and went home. Magically (and a bit on the frustrating side) I didn't have any further problems with the laptop once I got home. I booted the darn thing up and it worked just fine. Go figure! As my co-worker said, "It was your computer's special time of the month!"

I guess what I'm trying to say is that IT issues are real and sometimes can be expensive. I just wish that I could get them resolved in a timely manner and without the hassle that it has become today!

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