“Completely knackered,” says clueless user

The trouble with being the person responsible for something is that if something goes wrong with said items you’re responsible for, the people who use the items lose all basic troubleshooting ability.

L greeted me on the way in this morning. “I know it’s early, but my computer’s knackered,” she said. “The monitor won’t come on, the computer won’t come on, and the phone’s dead. Other people’s phones are working though.”

I cocked my head at her, like a dog shown a card trick. Immediate thoughts: four-way extension cord has been switched off or fuse has popped.

Upstairs we went, to take a look at her desk. “See?” she said, pressing the power button on her monitor. I took a quick glance at the plug sockets, which are all mounted at mid-wall level. There was one, with fairly thick, white flex, that was switched off.

“Come and stand here, and look where I’m looking.”

Disgruntled admin gets 63 months

From The Register

An IT manager who sought revenge for an unfavorable job evaluation was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison after being convicted of intentionally triggering a massive data collapse on his former employer’s computer network.

Jon Paul Oson, 38, of Chula Vista, California, was sentenced to 63 months behind bars and ordered to pay more than $409,000 in restitution, according to federal prosecutors in San Diego. He was immediately taken into custody after the sentence was handed down on Monday. It is one of the stiffest penalties ever for a computer hacking offense.

Oson was hired in May 2004 as a network engineer at the Council of Community Clinics in San Diego, a nonprofit that provides various services to 17 regional health clinics in Southern California. He performed well in that role and five months later was promoted to technical services manager. He ended up bitterly resigning a year later after a performance evaluation cited interpersonal difficulties, according to court documents.

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New Server = My Fault

I’m not sure if I’ve previously written about this, but I get the blame for everything at work. If it’s broken, it’s because of something I have done.

A few months ago, I was asked to make things on the network better, and move it off the ageing crappy Dell server that the whole network was relying on. So I threw in a shiny HP server, and slowly migrated services over to it.

One day, I moved all the Exchange boxes over, and all the clients on the network happily recognised that their mailbox had been moved and readjusted. Several weeks passed after the mailboxes had been moved with no problems being reported. Fantastic.

There was one member of staff who works almost permanelty from home, on the VPN. I got a call at 7pm, and he said that his email wasn’t working, and conveniently he needed to get to an email now, and that it was so urgent he just wanted me to undo whatever it was that I’d done to make everything work again.

I’ve done this job for seven years now so I’m an expert at keeping people calm and making them realise that, maybe, just maybe, it’s not actually my fault, and it might be something that they’ve done or haven’t done.

Oh no. Not this guy.

I needed to get a look at his laptop to see what was happening. Can I just get you to download a small program so I can connect in to your laptop and take a look? “Look, I just want you to fix this. I don’t have time for you to mess around and play with my laptop. There’s nothing wrong with my laptop. Just fix the servers.”

Doing The Website

When I write these I’m trying to be as objective as possible and not let my feelings get in the way of what I’m putting down.

I was asked to do the company website a while back. The design brief was “something modern and extensible”. So I had a scout around the web, found a design, and created a photoshop mock-up of it. “Yep, that’s fantastic,” the Directors cheered in unison.

So I spent a week designing a Joomla template around the photoshop mock-up, then a week populating it with “relevant” sample content and a bit of news, and then arranged a meeting with the Directors.

“We don’t like it. It looks like it will be too much hassle to keep updated. Can’t you make it so we don’t have to update it?”

The design brief now includes the criteria that stale content has to be acceptable. So, the dates come off the articles, the “Latest News” section goes and is replaced by static Press Releases and so on.

“I just don’t like it,” is the next piece of constructive criticism. “Can’t we make it so that it makes us look like a big company? Like, err… ” taptaptap “this one?”

The Curse of the Cisco boxes

The cabling engineer who has been dispatched to do these Cisco switches is still on his first switch, which means he’s taken about two hours to do it.

One down, twenty-nine to go by end of Wednesday.

Meanwhile, I’ve been told that the Cisco bloke has gone upstairs to talk to a Director, and said that why not get me involved as I’m not doing anything? He was categorically told no, do not involve me in it.

So I’ve done nothing all day. Other than write this.

Fire Safety

Yesterday, the reception area was cleared, citing “Fire Regulations”. Obviously this had Director backing. A sign was put up saying that the area must remain clear.

Today, there are a stack of Cisco boxes there. The person who cleared the area and put up the sign asked the Cisco bloke what they were doing there, and apparently the move was sanctioned by a Director.

Fire safety: here today, gone tomorrow.

The Company Mobile: Part 2

A week after I refused to sign the policy, nothing happened until I went to IFSEC at the NEC. It wasn’t much fun to be honest – been there, done that – and we hovered around for a bit.

But something interesting happened. There was a problem with one of the customers we support, and one of the lads we were with got the call, not me. So, he was working on it, and while it was really a problem that I should have dealt with, he was instructed to sort it out, not me.

The following day, back in the office, nothing was said. Then two days later, I was traveling to our other office, and spent the day working there. People needed to get hold of me, and had to round-robin call some of the staff that work in that office just to speak to me.

That was a Friday, and the week after I was working on a site somewhere. I got a text from one of the lads I work with who I’ve trusted with my number. It said “can you give M a call please, problems with email.”

I replied “No, sorry. I don’t have a phone to call him on.”

The Company Mobile

About five weeks ago, I took a couple of days off for family reasons. On the Monday, I got a call from a colleague on my team who told me that the mobile phone I’d come to rely on for the last year was getting switched off at the end of Monday (about 3pm) and we were all getting new ones.

I’d known for a while we were all getting new phones, but nobody had been told when. We’d also been promised that we were getting the new Nokia E71, as everyone wanted to embrace mobile email without embracing the cost of Blackberry devices.

At 11am that day, my phone went off. I have no landline, so I was stuck using my wife’s phone for the day, to keep in contact with my colleague who was bringing my phone to me.

I phoned him at around 6pm Monday, and asked him if he could bring my phone over. He said that they (“they”) wouldn’t give it to him because I have to sign a policy before I get it.

This policy is new to me. If I’d have been told I needed to sign a poilcy before getting my new phone, then I’d have had the policy signed and dated before taking leave for the two days. Instead, it was left to a last-minute decision, and the policy was probably copied off the ‘web somewhere.

Day 84

It’s not really day 84, but I’ve lost count. I’m going to write about what’s happening today, and then I’ll back-track over what’s been going on.

We’ve recently won a contract to roll out a large number of switches, access points and routers to hundreds of buildings in the UK, all owned by one company. These are Cisco switches and Cisco access points and Cisco routers, and (as you may know) it takes someone with an incling of technical knowledge to connect to a Cisco device, assign it an IP, upload firmware or config files, and save it and box it back up.

We’ve got hundreds of these switches to do. Thirteen pallets of switches, routers and access points.

To configure these devices, they’ve given the job to a cabling engineer, who’s in today to get as many done as he can. The person they’ve chosen does not have much technical experience. In fact, he doesn’t even have a PC at home. He has no technical experience other than pulling cables (which he’s very good at).

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here, waiting for the phone to ring, for a user either in this office to have a problem with the Internet and blame me for it.