Work To My Advantage

If you are on my Gmail IM list you noticed that my status was "Loves Bad Reviews" you also know the reason, but for the other people, who aren't my mom, who read this allow me to tell you about my wonderful work place for a moment!

Last Friday the IT shop received our weekly reviews from the students and teachers. Normally we get a cheap shot or two because we couldn't recover data for someone who never bothered to save it in the first place or I didn't navigate away from the aforementioned Gmail IM to be at their desk as soon as they hung up the phone, it's never too big of a deal. This class however has the perception is that we don't do much and we have been verbally abused the last couple weeks.

Some of the reasons for this are that we are a small shop and we have to prioritize our tasks. The other guys do it based on severity of the problem and your position on the food chain. I prioritize based on how nice you are to me and if your a woman, that breaks down again as to how hot you are. We also have the ability to fix problems through something called Remote Desktop. This program allows me to log into any computer on our network with out leaving my cube! Lazy IT nerds created this program for other lazy IT nerds because they don't want to have to leave World of Warcraft for too long. I have no problem saying that I'm lazy and I also hate being lazy but I want to not be lazy on my own terms (playing golf, hockey, guitar, etc.).

So incredibly long story just a tad longer, the director bitched to the lead contractor, who bitched to the assistant lead contractor, who bitched to the IT manager, who bitched to us. See how unnecessarily long that chain is? The end result is that we have to make more of an effort to go out and help the masses face to face. I don't have too much problem with that, it just means more "BRB" on Gmail. The real kicker though is this: we have to turn in daily reports on what we did that day. This is absurd because we already have a web based trouble ticket system that a drunk monkey could figure out how to use (it uses small words). This system has all the required information that would be in this daily report that I now have to type. Information like, time, date, problem, etc. So now I'm duplicating what is already recorded. Did I lose you yet?

When I discussed this with CJ, via Gmail IM of course, I decided to make things up.

-IMing with friends would be Remote Office Communications Assistance
-Going to take a leak would be Server File Transfer
-Getting lunch is now Installing Virus Protection
-If I have a lunch that makes me constipated and I spend some time on the can it will be known as Mail Server Back Up. If it's a Mexican or Chinese food day it's, of course, a Complete Data Dump and System Recovery (hopefully I'll recover anyway).