Forums Archive -> Message Board

expression 2001-01-30 12:01:00
by marasmus
working in IT is frustrating. There are a bunch of technically-not-with-it people making unreasonable requests of you, and you have to spend the majority of your time explaining to them why their request is so unreasonable. Then, they finally make one request that is feasible.. You say that it "can" be done, but not easily. Then they give you 48 hours to make it happen.

In the meantime, the things that typically break daily (such as the standard paper jam on the laser printer) keep on breaking, and what would normally not crunch on your necessary time is imposing huge losses of productivity. Add to that the wait-till-all-the-other-employees-are-gone mandatory password change on ALL accounts on ALL servers (WHEW! That one's fun to organize!), and then distributing the right passwords to the right people, after re-testing every single account on every single server... and you're suddenly earning the salary you're getting paid, and then some.

Don't forget about all those impossible tongue-twister questions that people are asking you, either... Can i make this single-session software auto-reconnect while keeping bandwidth to a minimum, but connection reliability at a maximum? Can I guarantee that we don't have any singular point of failure in the new hardware architecture, but we want to keep it under $XYZ dollars? How come you can't read MS Project 98 files? Oh, that's right... I'm running unix (hence the title Unix Systems Administrator) on a peruvian bastard-child of a PC while tap-dancing on the architectural wasteland of hybrid windows-compatible workstations that broadcast-flood the switches until they disable the ports!

No matter how cool or horrible your IT joint is, they're all the same at the core. You know what they don't, they have to shoot-and-miss a thousand questions off of your impatient and busy brain while you redesign some Mr. Wizard-like system for their next product, which they're trying to manage in MS Project 98, which you don't run.

It really makes me want to work construction... well, at least for the winter.