Everyone working in their respective offices, irrespective of their trade and profession is dependent on the “IT Guy”. This “IT Guy” is liked and disliked equally. For he controls your precious internet access and online gaming but also restricts you from watching movies while you say you are working.
I am one such “IT Guy”! Or rather the Head “IT Guy”. Not only does that make me responsible for everything in office, but also the reason for employee’s personal/family problems. This job may look easy from afar, is actually extremely frustrating and difficult. Same time it has its wonderful moments too.
Frustrating because everything that could go wrong, does, always! A printer only stops working when an urgent report is to be printed.We run out of ink and our procurement department is unable to buy ink for weeks because they couldnt print the Purchase Order to have it sent! In this world of technology, people are too lazy to use a PEN to write with their own hands. They’d much rather type it using a font that resembles their handwriting than write it themselves.
There are those too who have used a computer for office work for over a decade, yet they have trouble logging in. You may ask why? I’ll tell you why, I have this gentleman in office whose password was all lower case, and he tried to login with the CAPS lock on, i informed him of the problem, but that didnt deter him, he calmly explained he likes to keep the CAPS lock light on for company. I suggested to change password to all CAPITALS, he replied, he likes them in small characters only!
Now, someone explain to me, why would IT be blamed for him not able to login?
Take our All in 1, photocopier/scanner/printer machine for instance, now this is no small device, its 4 feet high and weighs close to 100kgs. You may wonder why I am giving these specifications instead of technical ones. This is because people here want this mammoth to be fit inside a cupboard that’s 2 feet off the ground, and explaining to them that why they shouldn’t be sitting below that cupboard is IT’s job!
And when such arguments are not going on, there is another to blame the IT. All such devices have ADF (Automatic Document Feeder), where you are supposed to remove the staple pins BEFORE you put your documents in the feeder. Here people are of a different breed. To them AUTOMATIC means that it should remove the pins before scanning and AUTOMATICALLY staple them again after scanning is complete. And when the scanner gets jammed, IT is held responsible for sabotaging the device under a conspiracy to stop others from working!
At the bachelor accommodation provided by the company we have an Internet Cafe connected to a wireless network. This Wifi access is restricted to Senior Management only. We have two independent internet connections on the same network. One for the cafe, one for the management. While this is simple enough to write on paper, its very difficult to explain to the management as to when they run IP Scanners, they can see the names of all the computers connected to the network, which makes them think that everyone has Wifi access. What they all conveniently forget is the downloading they are doing through P2P sites that’s slowing our internet connection!