I just read another infuriating article in the Wall Street Journal singing the same old tune: Some corporate IT user is bitching against e-mail quotas, blocked websites, the inability to install his own apps, and the aging workhorse that is Windows XP.
And as an IT manager, you know what I have to say to that?
Tough shit, jocko.
We IT types get reamed from both sides of the house. It’s an argument as old as commerce itself: Management wants to spend as little on IT as humanly possible. The user community wants shiny new toys every week. The two are not compatible with one another. And the most fun happens when the user community goes to management with their laundry-list of grievances: “Waaah! The network is too slow! Waaah! We want unlimited e-mail server space to store every piece of SPAM we’ve ever received since 1994! Waaah! We want unfettered access to the whole open Internet! Waaah! We want a 9,000GHz Octouple-Core laptop with a 90″ screen and 500gb of RAM and a 60tb drive so we can write letters faster in Word!” Then Management comes down on the IT department asking why all the users are so damn unhappy.
I happen to be pretty lucky at my job: while we get don’t always get new technology at brisk pace, it’s not a snail’s pace. And I’m lucky enough to be working with really, really smart people who are intelligent enough to know that you’re not supposed to be surfing Porn at work and that there ain’t no such thing as a “free” app on the Internet, so I don’t have to spend all my time being a mommy to an office full of recalcitrant children.
For the rest of you: Here’s a simple FAQ as to why the waaaaambulance hasn’t showed up at your desk with every little stupid IT request you asked for:
Q: Waaaah! Why can’t I have more e-mail storage space?
A: Because while disk is cheap, the boxes that the disk goes into is not. And because we don’t have a SAN (storage area network), we can’t just throw more disk in it on the fly. We have to plan disk upgrades into e-mail’s maintenance cycle and that means taking down the mail server for a few hours. Oh, did I mention that despite our repeated requests, management didn’t spring for a redundanr cluster that would keep one mail server up at all times while we worked on another to actually do these kinds of upgrades without disruption? So here’s my advice to you, bucko: Clean out your damn inbox and archive your mail locally. Trust me, it ain’t that hard, especially if you use Outlook.
Q: Waaah! There’s a laptop at Office Depot that has eleventy million times the specs that mine has! Faster processor! More disk! More memory! Bigger screen! Why can’t I have it!?
A: Because we’re a [insert manufacturer here] shop, and all of our technology purchases have to o through our corporate account so we can get corporate pricing. That laptop at Office Depot costs 10-25% more at Office Depot than what we can get it for. That’s why the purchase has to go through channels. And I asked your manager if you could have one like it the last ten times you submitted the request. He said no this time too, because it’s too expensive–and yelling at me ain’t gonna change that. Better luck asking Santa Claus. And besides–you’re making PowerPoint slides and Word documents–not curing cancer or decoding the human genome. Your current laptop is just fine. Deal with it.
Q: Waaah! I wanna surf the whole Internet! Why won’t you let me surf Myspace or Facebook or girlswith[BEEEEEEEP]intheir[BEEEEEEEP].com!?
A: Because Myspace is still the 25-dollar heroin-junkie hooker of the Web, frought with malware and spyware attack redirects. You think your PC is slow now? Wait’ll it gets infected and becones a zombie attached to some botnet, participating in DDoS attacks, SPAMming, and Kiddie-Porn storage (I swear I’m NOT making that one up–want proof? Here it is). Do that shit on your PC, in your own home, on your own time–not the company’s. I’m sick of re-imaging your goddamn PC. This is the third time this week.
Q: Waaah! I wanna install all my own programs! Why won’t you make me an administrator of my own machine so I can do that!?
A: See the previous question. Who the hell knows what you’ll install if given free reign on your box? The Internet is full of bad people just itching to take over a corporate machine, steal its data, and steal the bandwidth of the company network to do bad things.
Q: Waaah! Windows XP is old! I want a new, modenr operating system like Vista!
A: Well, you’re actually in luck there. Windows 7 is out, which is actually better than Vista, and isn’t the bloated pig that Vista was. I run Windows 7 on a Dell D610 at home, with a single-core 1.7GHz P4M, 2gb of RAM, and a 60gb hard drive-pretty modest by today’s standards, and so far it has done everything I’ve asked it to do. But I don’t know whether you realize this or not, but VISTA DIDN’T WORK! It was a big, bloated, buggy, DRM-filled, horrific steaming pile of dog shit. But don’t you worry. We’re doing compatibility testing on Windows 7 right now, and we’ll have an image available for rollout in a few months. BUT: That’s only if I can get Management to spring for the licenses, to the tune of $179.99 per computer. We need Windows 7 Enterprise, you see.
In summary: I’m sick to death of reading these hyperventilating articles from frustrated users bitching about their IT department. They haven’t the foggiest ideas that we in IT are no less frustrated, caught on the one side with having no budget to work with and on the other consisting of hoardes of screaming, dissatisfied users. IT is a hard job. If you think it’s so easy, you do it.
At the end of the day, the IT policy we make is directly dependent on the company policy that comes down from the upper echelons–and my loyalty is to the people who sign my checks, NOT to you. I’ve been tasked to keep our employees productive, our IT assets safe and accounted for, and give you the tools you require to do your job–no more, no less.
If you don’t like it, well, that’s just tough.
