The Locked Cabinet

With the big move complete, we are settled in the new office and the company's servers are now in one place, under our complete control. Well almost, We aren't allowed to touch the phone system and there is nobody in the team willing to get too close to the Mac Servers for fear of coming out in a disfiguring skin disease.

For these delicate operations we have a Mac Technician who doesn't mind using overpriced, Fisher-Price hardware that is about as useful as a condom machine in the Vatican.

It is now situated between the main patch panels and a proper server rack (namely, populated with Windows and ESX Servers). It is now known as the Mac Rack . One morning our Mac guy comes in and asks us for the key to the back of the rack.

The Id10t Migration Complication

It all started late on a Friday afternoon, as do most big, important projects. With our own move almost complete, it was now time to get the bean counters and the rest of the staff moved into the new building. Simples! Don't count on it!

It took two days hard labour to get every computer, monitor, printer, projector, TV, Sound system etc. disconnected, crated up and labelled. Not very exciting except for the huge battle of fighting through the stacks upon stacks of folder, boxes and other rubbish that the staff had kindly piled up around and on the computers themselves. And of course the game of cat and mouse we had to play in order to steal way the crates we needed to do the job. They were like gold dust and we had to use all our cunning and stealth to get enough containers to get it all done.

Moving Offices

It's an exciting time at the moment. A buzz is in the air, and it's not because of the fly nest in the false ceiling. It's taken years of planning, re-planning and planning again, and now the project is almost complete: A brand spanking new building for the company to move into within next few months.

It's looking very impressive on the outside and even more so on the inside. It's huge, it's one of a kind and state of the art. But this new entity has not come without its shortfalls in certain areas along the way. Areas: namely IT.

Strangely all the way through the project, in an IT based company with almost everything running off of technology, IT was not taken into consideration when designing the new building. Even stranger, when they finally realised that computers will be needed to run the business, and that a full network infrastructure would need to be put in place, they didn't bother to speak to the experts: Us!

The Great Software Installation Debacle

The World's Worst Software Engineer - Part 1

A new day, a new piece of software drifts our way. It will change the way the company works and streamline our procedures. It's state of the art and will save us money, time and man power. Not to mention it looks good and can take our personalised logo.

Wonderful! Another sales pitch full of buzz words that sounds too good to be true (it probably is) from a company no one has ever heard of, and the brainwashed bean counters are sucked in as they marvel at its high-tech excellence. It is overly expensive but before we know it, it is approved, bought and paid for without even consulting IT. On the plus side, it is going to be installed, setup and supported by the supplier. What could possibly go wrong?

The "Hacker"

A long time ago in an IT Office not too far away...

"We've been hacked." Our IT Manager tell us one morning as he stands on a chair to change the bulb in the alert light from green to red.

With the red bulb flashing and the alarm wailing, we all pluck up our ears and our then Senior Server Analyst frowns slightly and calmly asks. "Why? What's been hacked?"

"Oh, everything. Our entire network is compromised" our Manager panics, his glasses slipping down his nose. His thick grey hair seemed bigger than ever and he was clearly in a tizz.

How does it "Logon?"

It's that time of year again when we recall staff laptops and re-issue with new ones, with new more up to date software installed.

Today two of my colleagues had to go and swap out a few dozen laptops at one of our sites. About halfway through the morning they were dealing with a Gentleman and had just finished the transaction when he asked "How does this laptop log on?"

One of my colleagues explained that it was exactly the same as before where as the man replied with condescending superiority. "Don't be stupid, how on earth is it going to work like the old one?"

My colleague, a little taken aback by this tried to explain that all he had to do was log on the same as he did on his old laptop. The man shook his head again, refusing to believe him.

"It's a different Laptop, it won't logon the same as before, now tell me how I get on to it."

Multiple User Access

The most annoying users that report faults are the ones that don't believe the explanation you give them. They call us up asking for technical help, because they don't understand, but end up telling us we are wrong and then asking the same question elsewhere: Only to get the same answer.
One day our helpdesk took a call from a woman over in another building. She and two of her colleagues had an Excel spreadsheet that they all had access to and modified on a regular basis. On this particular day, all three had the file open, but only the first could edit it and then save the file. The other two had the file in "Read Only" mode.

Mid-Morning Down time

Every day for about two months, we kept getting reports of the network dropping in one particular area. All the computers would lose connectivity for about two minutes every day at around the same time: Roughly between 10:00 AM and 10:30 AM.

After numerous tests and diagnostics, we still couldn't find the problem. The cables seemed fine, and we tested the CAT5 sockets and even replaced the patch leads. The switches didn't show any faults, but the logs did report reboots everyday around the same time.

At first we thought maybe we were having power surges, so we put a UPS in place to keep the switches alive. However the problem continued. Replacing the switches with brand new ones didn't help and we were beginning to wonder if we had a faulty batch of LAN cards in the computers, although they had been fine for last two years.

One day after the connectivity had dropped again, a colleague and I were in the switch room watching the switches reboot all at once.