I think my company’s IT infrastructure is out to get me. Maybe not physical harm, but my productivity is definitely being impacted.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I spent the day twiddling my thumbs because the computer’s power supply failed. The twiddling was, of course, metaphorical. It’s been several years since I spent any significant amount of time literally twiddling my thumbs. Instead, I spent the day researching uses for the word “metaphorical.”
And then, just last week, I got a bonus day off when the building power went out. The backup generator failed too, so I got to go home and start my July 4th celebration a day early.
This morning, it was the corporate network that failed. I rebooted my computer and when it came back up, it could no longer connect to the network. It wasn’t just my computer having problems, a number of my co-workers had the same problem.
I’m not complaining though. Technology has always promised us more leisure time. I may as well enjoy it.
Perhaps I’ll brush up on my twiddling technique. 🙂
Category Archives: Work
Rough Week at Work
The original plan for this week was pretty nice: Saturday & Sunday off, work Monday, Tuesday off for the Fourth of July, work Wednesday, and then take Thursday through Monday off for Shore Leave. Or, put another way, two off, one on, one off, one on, five off. If you have to go to work, that’s not a bad way to do it.
After a fun weekend that included the Germantown fireworks, I showed up at work on Monday, raring to go. I got there right around 9:00 and not only was the power out (rumor has it there was a fire on the lines and the fire department cut them), but at some point the emergency generator had run out of oil and now there were no lights in the stairwells and the key card system was dead. (Folks could leave the office, but they couldn’t go back in.) Around 45 minutes later the first manager from our group arrived and after a short interval, started telling people to go home. (At this point the lights had been out for three hours with no known timeline for a resolution.)
Cool! Now I effectively had a four-day weekend, a one-day work week, and a five-day weekend. Now that’s the way to do it! (Especially since I didn’t have to use any extra vacation days.)
The lights went out at home for two hours on the fourth, so I thought it would be kind of fitting if my only remaining work day this week was canceled due to a third outage, but no such luck.
But it was still a great way to spend a holiday work week!
Slow Day at Work
I was at work until around 6:20 on Tuesday. Everything was pretty much wrapped up at that point, so it was a natural point to leave. Besides which, the power had gone out.
My PC has a battery backup so I don’t lose my work every time the lights flicker and it’s paid for itself several times over. Tuesday was another such time with the battery giving me enough time to finish the email I was writing and then shutdown my PC in a controlled manner. Almost.
The computer shutdown OK, but something must have got through to affect the power supply. When I tried to boot up on Wednesday, the only thing that happened was the lights on the front flashed endlessly.
I called the helpdesk and eventually someone came to look at my computer. The final conclusion was that my computer needs a new power supply. Evidently the Dell Optiflex systems the company bought a few years ago had some problems across the entire model line. In addition to my problems, the fellow across the aisle needs both a power supply and a new motherboard, a fellow in the next aisle just had his power supply and motherboard replaced two weeks ago, one of the project managers wasn’t able to get her system running for nearly two hours and a number of other people have reported similar problems over the past six months.
My computer is due back on Thursday. For Wednesday, I got some reading done. 🙂
Printer Fun
We recently purchased a new high speed printer at work and it wound up in the cubicle next to mine. Seeing as how I’d have to put up with the traffic and disruptions of people using the printer, I decided I was going to be the first to use it.
The first day the printer was available, I set up my computer to print to it and sent it a document that needed printed anyhow. To everyone’s disappointment (mine included) our brand new $5000 printer didn’t properly fuse the toner to the paper.
That afternoon, a couple guys from the tech ops group came up to look over the printer to see if they could figure out what was wrong with it. I joked that there was still a piece of plastic in the printer that said, “Remove this tab before operating.” We all laughed and after they spent some time cleaning the print drum and playing with the fuser temperature setting they eventually determined that the fuser was defective and they’d have to call the vendor for a new one.
Today, a week and a half later, the new fuser arrived in our office and one of the tech ops guys came up to install it. The first thing he did was to open up the printer and make sure he understood how it was all put together so he could do it correctly. I went back to work and a few minutes later, he asked me if I could try printing something.
After a couple false starts, I eventually came up with a print job that had text in the area where the toner hadn’t been fusing and this time around everything worked properly.
That’s when Joseph confessed that he hadn’t replaced the fuser. He’d simply discovered this small piece of plastic still in place that was labeled “Remove before operating.” Turns out my joke had been right on the money….
There’s a couple guys in tech ops right now with very red faces. 🙂
Update — October 13, 2005
There’s a new chapter in the saga of the new printer…
We’re long past the point of dealing with the problems caused by the set up guy not noticing the bit of plastic labeled, “Remove tab before first use.” Today the tech ops guys were trying to figure out why the $2,000 optional stacker wasn’t picking up jobs and wasn’t stapling documents.
It took them about 15 minutes to find the problem:
The stacker wasn’t plugged in.
That’s not the funny part.
I’ve been posting the saga of the printer to a humor list I subscribe to. About an hour after sending out the “not plugged in” update, I received a private message from another one of the subscribers, asking who the manufacturer was and what kind of printer it was.
Then I noticed her signature block. She works for the company that built it!