davehayes.org

i’m a network administrator for a small company. i look after a windows 2000 server, a novell server (which will be phased out when we move to windows server 2003) and a linux server in addition to about 40 users on our network using a mix of windows xp, windows 2000 and even windows 98 in a couple instances. i like my users and (i think) they like me. i love my job. i enjoy what i do, i enjoy the people with which i work and i make enough money to enjoy my life comfortably when i’m not at work.

i’m lucky because, especially for the field of information technology, my work environment tends to be relatively stress-free and laid back. our servers aren’t typically problematic (knock on wood), my users don’t tend to break things and when they do it’s usually very easy to fix. that’s not say that i’m immune from the usual set of IT related annoyances. sure there are a laundry list, but there is one thing in particular that is gnawing at me today. i imagine most of you (IT professionals or not) can relate…

the way our company is set up we have a local sales division and a national sales division, each with their own respective managers. the chain of command looks something like this:

the IT director (who is my direct superior) is only in the office three days out of the week. i seem to have a problem developing in that one of the managers sees me as her underling rather than her peer and somehow has it in her head that i do nothing but sit in my office and chat all day long, so she has decided to take it upon herself to see that my nose is kept pressed to the grindstone when my sup isn’t here. as if her constant attempts to catch me slacking off weren’t annoying enough, she seems to have also arrived at the conclusion that since i have nothing to do all day long i should be able to fix her and her division’s problems instantly. this whole situation has been festering for a while now, but sort of came to a head last week.

you see last week many email servers across the country were getting hammered with junk email from a new virus, and ours was no different. in the midst of my trying to get the issues resolved (mostly an overwhelming amount of undeliverable mail in the SMTP queue that seemed to regenerate every 60 seconds or so… but i didn’t know that’s what it was at the time), this particular person felt the need to email, call or stop by my office every half hour demanding updates and reminding me just how mission critical it is that i get this fixed right now. whatever lady, i know and i’m working on it, what else do you want?

well, as usual i was sitting at my desk one day just before quittin’ time with the server’s management console open poring over some tech document in hopes of finding some clues into resolving our problem, and she came storming into my office to give me an earful about our email being slow and whatnot. i told her the same thing i’d been telling her, “i’m working as quickly as i can and as soon as i have news i’ll let you know.” so she stormed out of my office and about 1 minute later my phone rang. great. i answered and (of course) it’s the GM. he asks me almost verbatim what she just did in my office, and i told him the same thing. he thanked me, provided a little encouragement (i’m sure he could hear the frustration in my voice by this point) and hung up. then, i figured it out. i finally figured out what the problem was and was able to find a solution within minutes. great! except that now a certain someone thinks that her little tirade in my office and taddling to the GM is “what it takes to get stuff done around here.”

fast forward to yesterday, late in the day. one of my users (and an underling of you-know-who) calls to tell me her computer is “being contrary.” further explanation provides that it’s rebooting randomly. so i put on my best sherlock holmes face and go to check it out. first thing was to check the system logs, which report nothing other than “the computer was restarted following a bugcheck.” thanks for all the useful information, windows. so i disable the automatic rebooting on a system failure and tell her to call me when she gets the blue screen. about 20 minutes later she calls and i go check it out to find out that the failure is due to a novell system file. now we’re getting somehwere. so i uninstall novell and update her to latest version and ask her to call me if it happens again. i didn’t hear from her for the rest of the day.

this morning, she called to tell me that her computer had crashed again. i didn’t even have time to finish up what i was doing before i recieved an email asking, “what’s the deal? when are you going to fix this?” and then on with the typical “the sky is falling” BS. how do you deal with people like this?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 1:07 pm and is filed under life, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.