Undoing the work of the corporate Computer Nazi...

[frog]

I work in an IT department for a medium sized engineering firm with around 500 users. When someone calls our help desk we can have someone at their desk side before they've put the phone down. I adopted a 'patrol' system so when things are slack or I'm at one of the factory I take a long walk back, picking up and doing jobs on the fly. My record is go out for one and come back having done 16.

I understand you bitch about IT but you have to realise this isn't your property and our first responsibility is to protecting the company's data. If that means you don't get to have every flashy screensaver under the sun then so be it. I don't work for you - I work for your boss.

If you ever get a moment spare try running msconfig on your pc and take a llok at the crap running in the background. I've seen a tablet PC running 100 processes, when most laptops only run 35 and a desktop 25. Another little job is cleaning our 'wunderkind's' laptops up for them so they actually work. I did one last year for the bloke who heads up our most important contract in 30 years. I deleted 36,000 rubbish files on the first pass. After that I found he got 3.5 Gigabytes of data which wasn't stored on the servers, just on his bloody laptop. Regrettably, he's not untypical of our average user.

Sorry folks but in my experience most computer users should have a chimp as a minder, . Walking around PC World and subscribing to Stuff magazine doesn't make you an expert.

 

[Joe24]

We have the problem at school. You can only do so much on them. So if you put headphones in and your lucky the volume is up, you can listen to music. Problem is that it is normally right up, so its too loud.
There is also a company that blocks out websites tahts got games on them, or will play the radio or music, i tried to find a recipy for banana muffins, and that was blocked. the proxies are also blocked, even the ones on page 156 were all blocked. Even the head of ICT doesnt agree with it because he knows from looking that the kids just spend the time loking for websites that arent blocked, so its a waste of time.
They also blocked wallpapers, until i found out you could set it as desktop icon, then just make it bigger. Only works for some, some get pixalated.

 

[Rhythm Thief]

Eeeh. Computers at school? Never have happened when I were a lad. This used to be all abacuses round here ...

No, I think we had a roomful of Commodore 64s or something similar. One up from an Etch - a - Sketch now but state of the art back then.

 

[yello]

For some bizarre reason, I feel the need to defend IT departments... but I won't. I was a programmer in a team of web and database developers, we often had to battle with the IT dept just to get access to sites, or be 'allowed' to install and/or run certain software, we weren't allowed admin privileges on our PCs... so we would be speaking to them fairly frequently. Thing is, there were occasions where we knew what we wanted and how to do it but had to watch as some bod from IT fiddled and pfaffed around trying to get it done. Then IT support was 'outsourced' to IBM; same staff, same office, but we all had to go on a training course to learn how to log a problem on their help system. We'd spend days waiting for resolution then!

 

[yello]

I don't work for you - I work for your boss.

Boy you do work in IT don't you!

How about, we all work together for the same company...

 

[Maz]

Anyone else have to suffer with having to use Lotus Notes at work?
What a big pile of poo.

 

[Danny]

I work in an IT department for a medium sized engineering firm with around 500 users....

I understand you bitch about IT but you have to realise this isn't your property and our first responsibility is to protecting the company's data. If that means you don't get to have every flashy screensaver under the sun then so be it.

As someone else who works in an IT Dept I have some sympathy with what frog says. However, I have also seen first hand how decisions about corporate IT policies can be made by one or two IT operational managers on a pretty arbitrary basis, without any consultation or communication with the people who need to use the IT. So the suspicions about corporate computer nazis are partly true.

If the people who made these decisions talked to users first, and then explained why it could, for example, be dangerous to allow people to download certain screen savers there would be a lot less hostility when corporate policies are imposed.

I don't work for you - I work for your boss.

However most bosses rely on the recommendations of their IT people and don't really understand the detail of the IT security policies they have agreed. I don't expect them to be IT experts but they should be asking some hard questions about whether proper consultation and communication has taken place before agreeing to new corporate IT policies.

 

[Horace Goes Skiing]

I understand you bitch about IT but you have to realise this isn't your property and our first responsibility is to protecting the company's data. If that means you don't get to have every flashy screensaver under the sun then so be it. I don't work for you - I work for your boss.

I work for my boss too. Hmm. I see the problem here - we must eliminate the boss!

 

[4F]

Anyone else have to suffer with having to use Lotus Notes at work?
What a big pile of poo.

Yeah I do and to be honest I quite like it.

 

[Maz]

Yup. As an email programme it's dire. But we cant do without it because it does so much more than anything MS has.

Yes, I should've said. For email it is terrible, but we also use it for scheduling meetings and the like.

 

[Fab Foodie]

If the people who made these decisions talked to users first, and then explained why it could, for example, be dangerous to allow people to download certain screen savers there would be a lot less hostility when corporate policies are imposed.

QUOTE]
In my case, this would have helped rather than recieving a "my" laptop back with bits missing and the problem unresolved. Still for the decision makers to talk to users first would require some communication ability...

 

[bonj2]

Eeeh. Computers at school? Never have happened when I were a lad. This used to be all abacuses round here ...

No, I think we had a roomful of Commodore 64s or something similar. One up from an Etch - a - Sketch now but state of the art back then.

in my day it wasn't PCs and finding internet sites that weren't blocked, but archimedeses and sneaking into the woodwork department to use the one PC with a working floppy drive to make an illicit copy of lemmings

 

[alecstilleyedye]

Eeeh. Computers at school? Never have happened when I were a lad. This used to be all abacuses round here ...

No, I think we had a roomful of Commodore 64s or something similar. One up from an Etch - a - Sketch now but state of the art back then.

luxury! we had a commodore pet, an apple IIe and some bbcs.

i got put in the cse computer studies group for doing my project in microsoft basic (on my dragon 32), because the teacher hadn't "heard of" microsoft. i wish i hadn't

 

[Fab Foodie]

Anyone else have to suffer with having to use Lotus Notes at work?
What a big pile of poo.

Yep, my current employer and at my previous employer... and I loathe it, I loathe it for emails, for scheduling meetings and I loathe all the database applications it connects too, I detest booking rescources online, I hate the way it looks and operates, I detest the way we're all slaves to the viscious bastard program...

 

[Fab Foodie]

Boy you do work in IT don't you!

How about, we all work together for the same company...

Wow, steady-on, that's a tad radical...somewhere we'll have to introduce the concept of "Customer"...