IT Geeks. Gotta love 'em.

[Lou Girardin]

My wife has been trying to arrange remote access to her work PC so she can work while recuperating from a small op.
When she spoke to their IT dept, there was much mumbling, tsking and collective shaking of heads about the impossibility of doing this.
Things were looking bleak until the CFO went to IT and asked them what they thought the consequences for them would be if he had to tell head office that the most omiportant financial report of the year would be late because they can't work this problem out.
BingO! Remote access by days end yesterday.

[WRT]

Lets say it was one of your sales team that needed to be laid up for a while. You get asked by this co-worker "can you set me up to sell from home?". Well, yes, it could be done, we can get telecom to patch your extention to your home phone, we can redirect a certain percentage of customers to your home, then we can get all our surplus stock and display cabinets and ship them out to your house, and set it all up there. This of course, all to be done on top of your normal workload, while you still man the shop and take care of the customers that wander in off the street.

Yes, sure it can be done, but your not gonna be too keen to do it unless the big boss comes down and says do it now or your arse is on the line.

Maybe this is over dramatising it all a bit, but I can sympathise with your IT dept. These things are possible, but its not as simple as "flicking a switch" to make it so. And there's not just the aspect of doing the work, there's also security risks involved.

[Lias]

Consider my button severely pushed.

I hope she dies slowly of an incrediably painful wasting disease after watching everyone she knows and cares about being killed in front of her eyes. Okay maybe I exaggerate but users like her who throw their weight around and go to senior managers because they dont like the answer they get from the IT department piss me right off.

If your wife was sitting in queue for something, and someone jumped in front of her would she be annoyed? I bet she would, most peopel woudl be. Yet this is exactly what she's done. I'd damn near guarantee that to provision this for your wife, the IT department has had to drop what they are doing and pander to her needs on threat of loosing their jobs. Fuck her and all users like her.

*FUME*

[Wolf]

Calm down Lias, as you well know, we IT staff do nothing but sit aropund all day picking our noses waiting for "that particular" end luser to ring and make their request so we can instantly gratify them. Remember, we don't really have over a thousand other lusers and a shit-load of routine tasks. It's perfectly reasonable that we should have to drop everything and totally reconfigure the system to allow people access from home at a moment's notice.

Security? Meh! Every work-place should have a direct dial into the main system. Pays not to put a password on it either lest it inconvenience the lusers...

[sAsLEX]

Consider my button severely pushed.

I hope she dies slowly of an incrediably painful wasting disease after watching everyone she knows and cares about being killed in front of her eyes. Okay maybe I exaggerate but users like her who throw their weight around and go to senior managers because they dont like the answer they get from the IT department piss me right off.

If your wife was sitting in queue for something, and someone jumped in front of her would she be annoyed? I bet she would, most peopel woudl be. Yet this is exactly what she's done. I'd damn near guarantee that to provision this for your wife, the IT department has had to drop what they are doing and pander to her needs on threat of loosing their jobs. Fuck her and all users like her.

*FUME*

Typical dumb IT response hence why you are earning IT dollars instead of management dollars, maybe just maybe your precious little que of password changes and other things menial is actually LESS important than something which will affect the companies profit like a omiportant financial report of the year
. Maybe next time ignore request like this and when the company goes broke at least you would of won!

retard

[Ixion]

Interesting how well the CFO has made provision for backup. So if Mrs Giradin had not been able to produce this vital report - had her op been more serious f'instance - the "most important financial report of the year" would presumably not have been available at all.

I hope they got in writing the CFO's acceptance of responsibility for all the Head Office security edicts that were ignored to make it happen .Bet it'll still be their heads that roll if the auditors find out though.

[RantyDave]

When she spoke to their IT dept, there was much mumbling, tsking and collective shaking of heads about the impossibility of doing this.

The mumbling, tsking and collective shaking of heads would almost certainly not have been regarding the impossibility, more likely it would have been about how this was going to affect various management and security policies.

OK. I'll try and do it in English. Big Microsoft rigs are notoriously delicate. To make one work you have to do *exactly* what Mr Microsoft says and absolutely nothing else. If it is working, you don't fuck with it because the chances of nuking the entire company are huge. The other thing you do is put a firewall between it and the Internet configured to let pretty well nothing come in. Popping a hole in the firewall is a big deal because it's another "vector" for viruses and Korean teenagers to amble around inside your company network and fuck things over. Popping a hole over to one particular PC is made harder because from a networking perspective they can amble from one place to another, although this can be infrequent.

Anyway, so this call comes in and someone wants to work from home. What it means is "should we risk the entire fucking house of cards so that one person can work from home" and the answer is no. Under these circumstances it clearly takes someone high up in the company to enter the risk, and once the decision has been taken it'll be somewhere between half and hour and an afternoon to make it go. As you saw.

Not that I'm defending the geeks, and not that I'm defending Microsoft who are responsible for the situation in the first place. I'm just saying that this is the way it is - sad, and rather pathetic.

Aside: I work writing software for people that make movies, TV etc. Many of them are so concerned about what would happen if they caught crabs off the Internet that they don't connect their "work" rigs to the Internet at all.

Dave

[Ixion]

,, actually LESS important than something which will affect the companies profit like a omiportant financial report of the year
. Maybe next time ignore request like this and when the company goes broke at least you would of won!

retard

How is any financial report going to affect profit in the slightest? Let alone send the company broke. A financial report, if it has anything to do with profit at all, reports the profit that has (or has not) already occured. Bean counters don't contribute to profit in any way (and spare me the flames, I'm one of them) ; they just keep score.

[Wolf]

Interesting how well the CFO has made provision for backup. So if Mrs Giradin had not been able to produce this vital report - had her op been more serious f'instance - the "most important financial report of the year" would presumably not have been available at all.

I hope they got in writing the CFO's acceptance of responsibility for all the Head Office security edicts that were ignored to make it happen .Bet it'll still be their heads that roll if the auditors find out though.

Security is not an issue, remember, all we do is a "cue [sic] of password changes" and it is a trivial task to allow an external machine to have access to the system. As IT professionals we need not concern ourselves with important matters such as the security infrastructure of the whole company because it's not like the company would haemorhage money if the security were to be compromised, is it?

I mean, what matter if the wrong person were to get access, who cares if the servers go down due to some malware introduced, and who cares about the other staff at work who're waiting on repairs to their machines etc.

[Lias]

Typical dumb IT response hence why you are earning IT dollars instead of management dollars, maybe just maybe your precious little que of password changes and other things menial is actually LESS important than something which will affect the companies profit like a omiportant financial report of the year
. Maybe next time ignore request like this and when the company goes broke at least you would of won!

retard

I'm afraid my IQ is entirely too high, and my work ethic too good to work as a manager.
If the report was so goddamn important, then the CFO should be fired for incompetency for not having contingencies in place for lou's wife to be off work sick.

Just remember that piss poor planning on managements part does not constitute an emergency on the IT departments part. Also remember that pissing off your IT department is about as stupid as pissing off your payroll department. Pissed off geeks can do all sorts of nasty things to make your working life miserable, corrupt files, delete files, change passwords, randomly remove internet access, and thats without getting really vindictive.

[The_Dover]

If all you IT goons are so snowed under with password changes and shit then what the fuck are you doing on here?

[RantyDave]

Just remember that piss poor planning on managements part does not constitute an emergency on the IT departments part.

Yes, yes it does. IT departments, and the industry in general need to remember that we exist to serve the remainder of the business and not the other way round. For their part the remainder of the business could do well to remember that we'd be much more effective (read: cheaper) if they could plan, just a bit, for a change.

Dave

[thatHurt]

How is any financial report going to affect profit in the slightest? Bean counters don't contribute to profit in any way (and spare me the flames, I'm one of them) ; they just keep score.

Ixion you surprise me with you occupation. From previous posts I thought you were a revolutionary! Bringin it down from the inside hey?

[Ixion]

Oh, that's easy. I've reset all the user passwords to random non ascii values so none of them can log in. And since our help desk is web based, they can't log in, to access a browser, to raise a help desk call to say that they can't log in.And as they can't log in they can't acess email to email me either. And our phone system is VoIP and ties into their net login. Wonderful thing technology.

And if any of them do manage to access another browser to do the automated "I've forgotten my password, please email it to me when I answer the secret question" thing, they won't be able to read, let alone enter, the password, being in non-ascii. So , peace, perfect peace.

And since everyone's affected I shall blame it on a network spike, caused by Telecom, who are to blame for everything. Must be, cos that's the only thing that's common to everyone.

[Pixie]

Consider my button severely pushed.

I hope she dies slowly of an incrediably painful wasting disease after watching everyone she knows and cares about being killed in front of her eyes. Okay maybe I exaggerate but users like her who throw their weight around and go to senior managers because they dont like the answer they get from the IT department piss me right off.

If your wife was sitting in queue for something, and someone jumped in front of her would she be annoyed? I bet she would, most peopel woudl be. Yet this is exactly what she's done. I'd damn near guarantee that to provision this for your wife, the IT department has had to drop what they are doing and pander to her needs on threat of loosing their jobs. Fuck her and all users like her.

*FUME*

You're a space saver