Great rant (I wish I could say that at work, they'd just fire my ass and hire someone else - albiet with far less satisfactory results for ~5x as much, you should see the mess IT is at my work, most of my job is cleaning up the mess others have left). Unfortunatly our techs at school are useless. They have that power attitude you have shown, and they will happily ban you from the computer labs for 2 weeks if you contradict them, but they completly suck at making computers work - our comptuers will crash if you look in the "all programs" list on the start menu, or do anything productive (eg create a flow chart in office - which is 2002, which they have upgraded to this year). There is no resident virus protection on the comptuers, they run slow as treacle when on paper they're faster than my computer at home. They have gone to the lengths of disabling our abilty to right-click, use run, or open task manager (which makes it nearly impossilbe to recover from the crashes that happen at least 3 times in a 1-hour lesson of wasting time), to try and stop us from using net send of all things - they haven't disabled the service and its not hard to create a shortcut to "cmd". Oh yeah, and they deleted my entire directory becuase I had an executable in it, which I had to have there becuase the copy (of a program that is at least 8 years old) on the HD doesn't work. Lucky I backup onto my flash drive, on which they missed the several trojans and other *tools* I keep on there when they virus scanned it before letting me use it. </rant>
Amen brother Instant Rice I'm totally with you there! Hey out of curiosity what qualifications do you have? I would like to work on a school or college for pretty much the same reasons you gave there. Working for a big corp. you could die in the comms room and no one would even notice, but at a school you tend to be appreciated more, and that's what I need in my life I feel. All the more so if it happens to be an all girls college
Heh im the manager of the IT department were I work so no im not overworked BTW anyone saying there essentional are blind to the market there working in, if you gave me **** (or anyone for that matter) I could fire you and have a replacment within a week and probebly on less pay to! Gotta love an oversturated IT work force thats only getting bigger
How many staff you responsible for at what sort of organisation - I'm on my way down the IT management route.
35 some float to "satellite" buildings (you get more money that way ). I work for a pharmaceutical company.
You been doing it for long? How do you find it? Are you pretty much left to your own devices? I take it you control web access etc...
About one and a half years. Quite easy, the IT infrastructure was already in place and set in stone when I took over here so all I have to do is keep things ticking over, spend (read: waste) my budget, go to boring ass meetings and justifiy why I need all my staff. Pritty much, but if the labs want something IT related they get it.... quickly I control everything I dont know how any of it works but thats not my job
Actually, I'm not certified in anything, although I'll probably be taking CCNA and A+ where I work since I can take the classes for half price . I was on payroll there before I graduated as a job placement opportunity. Before I was on payroll, I worked there for what they call work-based learning, which was basically an excuse not to have to put up with my lab instructor but still get credit for class. That's partly the reason I make so little. My "boss" is actually more my supervisor. He isn't in charge of my pay, but he can suggest I be paid more. He keeps telling his boss (Larson, he's in charge of our checks, but he's not one of the IT people) that I should be on salary pay. I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with how working for a school is in the states. Retirement plan, full health and dental insurance (including glasses), and significantly more than $6.50 an hour. At least that's how it is in Ohio.
Pretty sure I've posted this story before but it's so good it needs a repost. One summer I was working for a company doing normal office type things my desk used to be next to a guy call Keith who basically tech support for everything. Now oneday we were the only 2 people in the office when we get a call from our subdivision in Germany who claim the satelite is broken (their words). So erhm I check and notice access to the database is all good. Next they say they can't send us any messages. So Keith goes to the sat out building and sends a message from the terminal while I ask them on the phone if they can see the message he is sending. They say yes I ask them to respond. So they type a message back it's all good. So now we are very confused as to wtf the problem is. After some more probing by we they admit the problem is: German guy "We can't use the numberpad on the terminal keyboard" Me " Try pressing numlock" German guy "Thank you" hangs up. Lucky no-one noticed the transmissions or the 20min germany to england phone call.
You wouldn't believe the number of people that say their system is locked up and won't display anything at my job. The funny thing is when I walk in, look them right in the eyes, and turn their monitor on to show the Windows desktop without breaking my gaze with them.
ROFLMAO... I have had that same problem before with BOTH my mom and dad. I never did the star at them in the eye thing though. I should have. Will next time.
So I was sitting at work one day, and one of the part timers in the office asks me for some help with her computer. I ask my friend Oscar to look and see if everything is ok, and he comes back and tells me that he doesn't know what the problem is. I go back there, and the comp. is making this horrendous beeping sound. The girl is like "Help, I don't know what I did wrong, can you fix it?" After surveying the situation for a few moments, I walked over to the comp. and calmly removed the corner of a stack of papers that was mashing the ESC key.
I had the same problem, killjoi. Except it was with the ctrl key and the complaint was that his mouse was acting screwy. If you know a simple solution will immediately work, staring directly at the person while you fix it is one of the greatest forms of demeaning someone known to man. "You're such an idiot I know how to fix this without even looking." Freaks them out. Damn do I love my job.
Scary enough, the only reason I knew that was the problem immediately, was because I had done the same thing many years ago, and my Mom had the satisfaction of doing it to me.
/me laughs at Kiljoi j/k I did the same thing once several years ago as well. hehe... I forgot that I used to be a newb. now, I'm a gnub
