I’m feeling kinda beat up today so I thought i’d start a new list if things that will make your IT guy jump off a bridge. Most of the time just one instance of these things will only annoy him or her but cumulatively they should be sufficient to cause mental breakdown. I will update this post over time to reflect new tactics my users have used on me and my coworkers.

1- Start your emails with the phrase “I know I’m supposed to put in a ticket, but…”

2- spend time putting a pretty background and a totally unreadable font for your email, then call for help because you can’t figure out MS Word.

3- come by at lunch to ask us technical questions. Bonus points if it is about your home system. Double bonus points if it is about the system at your side business. Be sure to acknowledge that you are interrupting an otherwise quiet and peaceful meal.

4- Make up something work related to call about so you can nag about not being able to use E-bay from your WORK computer.

5- Learn, and use “computer guy” lingo. Refuse to use it correctly. Be sure to note in our satisfaction surveys how rude it was of your technician to correct you.

UPDATE:

6- Open the program of your choice, then pick up your keyboard and mouse by the cord… swing them around above your head, being sure to hit walls, desks, co-workers, etc in such a way that multiple settings are changed and you have no possible way of knowing what you did. BONUS: Tell the IT Guy you were just trying to change your email signature.

7- When filling out the survey, be sure to point out that 5 hours was far to long of a response time for a 3-day response time ticket. It makes us happy.

8- NEVER, I mean NEVER clean the dust off your computer. This way, when you call us because your keyboard is unplugged (because you kicked the cable) we get a face full of dust, and you can say “Whew, that sure is dusty! I’ll bet that’s the dustiest computer you’ve ever seen!”. You’d be wrong.

I’ve discussed in some detail here the frustrations that go with being in IT. It’s a good career choice, and I don’t regret going into the field. IT has good moments. There are few feelings better than coming up against a big challenge and finally seeing the system work when you’ve found the solution.

I do some side projects from time to time, mostly for people I know or one time support for someone who has been stranded without any help. I was doing some side work this week and one of the people there asked the question “So, how do you like working in IT?”

The answer that came out of my mouth was more insightful than I expected at 7:30am: “IT gets all the respect of a janitor with the skillset of an engineer”

Now, that may sound bitter or cynical, but I think it really sheds some light on why this industry has such a high rate of burn-out. I was actually interrupted while writing this post by a phone call from my job because a part of the system wasn’t working. To the end user, the solution took about 60 seconds, so the assumption tends to be that my job is easy or that what I do takes the same amount of time as taking out the trash. The truth is, the time that went into that solution is a combination of hundreds of man-hours.

From my recliner, I can log into the network at work. To do that, someone had to first build the network  and provide some way of getting there from the outside world and verifying that i’m supposed to be connected. Once I’m connected, there have to be servers in place that again verify my identity and give me access. Then I have to know where to find the problem, a knowledge base that can take years to develop, and then know how to solve the issue.

So, while what I do seems like it’s easy (and don’t get me wrong, for me it is pretty easy most of the time) it really isn’t that easy.

The burn-out comes from the fact that the recognition is low when the skills are high. I don’t think most people want a cheering squad every time they reset a password or restart a server, but cumulatively the minor miracles we IT folks perform on a daily basis that go unrecognized can make us question how appreciated we are.

I’ve seen what happens when an IT guy leaves, especially when they are the only one. There is usually a real awakening to the amount of work that goes into what we do.

So the next time you walk by your IT guy’s office and he’s sitting in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of his monitor.. don’t assume that just because he is reading the news or browsing a white paper that he’s goofing off. Grab the man a fresh Mountain Dew, maybe a candy bar and give him a “Thanks for what you do!”  It goes a long way, and the next time your computer breaks, you might just end up higher on the list or with a new flat panel monitor instead of a dingy old CRT from the stock room.

Yep, it is amazing how productive I can be when there aren’t any games on that interest me (Well, Texas Tech v OU is an exception)

I got up at 5 this morning. Today is the opening day of deer season, so I was in my tree stand just after 6am. About 6:45 I saw some movement in the field, and drew up my gun to get ready for ol’ Buck Nelson to walk out in front of me. No such luck. Coyotes.

There is an open season on predators in Alabama, so I drew down on two of them and fired off a couple of rounds. I hit one, missed the other but I didn’t find either one when I got down to go look. A combination of the fact that A) there are coyotes in my field and B) I just made a LOT of noise and scent, there was virtually no chance that a deer would walk out this morning. I stayed in my tree stand until almost 9am before the reality that it was 19 degrees outside overcame my desire to kill the big one.
Ok, so that part of my day wasn’t all that productive.

After eating some breakfast at Mom and Dad’s, I came home and crawled under the house to run a new cable for my HF Radio (ham radio stuff). Ever since this guy came to my church to talk about how he was almost electrocuted underneath a house, getting under there has been really nerve racking for me. Sure, he saw Jesus, but I’m just not there yet ok?

Either way, I got that done and was inside soldering a connector on the cable when my brother called and invited us to go eat. I put the project on hold and went to meet them for a late lunch/early supper. We came home and gave the dog a bath (he’s a little sickly and despite my policy of no animals in the house, he really doesn’t need to be outside with it this cold.) I played with my radio stuff some more and watched Micah jump around like a crazy person for about 3 hours because the dog is in the house.

Now, I’m sitting here watching the end of the Texas Tech v OU game, and even though nothing I did today is of any real consequence, I feel like I have gotten a lot done because I managed to do one thing: relax and not worry about work.

One day at a time.

My last post was all about my first day on call, and how I was hopeful that it wouldn’t be too bad. My day didn’t turn out to be too bad. I ended up back in the server room on Saturday night babysitting a dead server that turned out to be the worst server crash I have ever seen and has managed to make the last week of my life very interesting to say the least.

—— WARNING : GEEK CONTENT AHEAD ——–

So, the RAID 5 volume on the mail server died when one of the other network guys got the bright idea to plug another hard drive in to give us more space. In his defense, it is *supposed* to work that way, but in this case instead of giving us more space, it killed the whole array and gave us NO space… including the space where all the executive’s and department head’s e-mail lived.

Not. Good.

—— Still geeky, but more English resumes here ——

We (and by we, I mean mostly I) spent the whole weekend trying to recover the drives and get a usable server up before Monday morning and in the process recover everyone’s data.  This was particularly urgent because due to some software failures, we didn’t have a good backup of any recent e-mail. As of today, we still don’t have that data back.

I was in the office until about 11pm on Sunday trying to get a new server up so that we could at least have e-mail on Monday morning. Due to the poor state of the network and the fact that the old server was dead, it just wasn’t happening. I cried “uncle” about 10:00, and it took another hour to get things back to a workable state before leaving the office.

I determined on Sunday morning that some users still had some of their e-mail on their computers, so I wrote out some instructions for the other techs and we set about backing up as many of the computers as we could. Meanwhile, we were waiting on the consultants to call us about what the best next move would be, but about 3:30, we just couldn’t wait any longer. I made the call that we needed to blow away the whole email infrastructure and build a new server. At this point, we had been down for about 96 hours, and soon the natives would be getting restless.

Somewhere around 10:30 I got the new server online, handling mail and in the beginning stages of getting it ready for users. One of the other techs came back in to help me get things in the rack, but that turned out to be a bad idea. He decided to take this opportunity to mess with my head a little, and so I left about midnight and proceeded to spend the night having panic attacks. I’m a little prone to those anyway, and I’m sure that being tired didn’t help. EIther way I was back in the office around 9:30 the next morning, started making mailboxes for everyone on the new server. Thankfully, I managed to get out of the office before midnight on Tuesday, but spent most of the day on Wednesday working on the CEO, CFO and various other C-titled people’s computers.

If you think that working on a regular user’s e-mail is stressful, try explaining to the CEO of your company why the e-mail has been down for 120 hours and why we don’t have backups.

Thankfully, today was still hectic but it was really just more about supporting the other techs as they finished up moving everyone’s mailboxes over.

So that has been my week. I hate Microsoft Exchange more now than ever before, but I’ve managed to learn SO much this week. I didn’t mean to, but I think I have set myself up to always be “The Exchange Guy”. There’s one thing about it: as long as they insist on using Exchange, I should have a job!

Today is my first day on call at the new job. Thankfully I’m not on call the whole week. I’m only on call because I swapped a Saturday with another guy so I wouldn’t have to be on call the Saturday before Christmas when my family does all it’s stuff.

Yes, that’s right. I’m on call the entire week of Christmas. It’s the joy of being the low man on the totem pole.
Either way, further proving that when it comes to my hate of Microsoft the feeling is mutual, the Exchange server is down. Thankfully, I’m not the one who broke it. I will, however be the one who has to fix it.  I’m waiting on a status update from the other network guy.
Other than that, this job is going really well. It’s a great environment, it’s a challenge and it’s not all on my shoulders which may be the best part of it all.