Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Just your friendly IT department (Rant)


It is nothing new... a computer problem and a mad panic phone call or email stating the computer they were working on which has a project that has to get out right away, just went down with some strangeness happening on it. Heaven forbid that IT person is actually busy working on some other "major problem" because your new problem is obviously more important! 

It doesn't matter how much preventative maintenance your computer guru does because accidents happen and thy computer is one big accident waiting to happen! Depending on how quickly the problem is corrected is how decorated your computer IT person becomes. 
So what if we were to view things from that IT person's perspective....a typical job where a computer has enough problems that require a 'reset' or 'reformat and reinstall', noting this can be done quite often by using the built in 'factory recovery disk'  but of course before doing something like this you should have already been in touch with your computer person to make sure the data is correctly backed up, since there are usually two methods to any factory recovery. One is to simply reinstall the operating system files over top of the the old, making your data still recoverable/reusable and the other is to perform a reformat of the partition and reinstall of everything so that the system looks just like it did when you first purchased it and turned it on for that first time.
If your IT person is off-site, which in most cases they are these days, you are going to have to reinstall the remote communication software first, before any further work can be performed, which would including getting your life back together... so why would one take almost a week to get around to doing something like this only to then start wondering where certain, specific files are, whey they should know full well that this IT person is completely in the dark as to what the current status even is on the machine in question, quite simply because the remote software has yet to be installed?
So the next time you are planning on performing major maintenance which is going to sever the communication between the computer in question and your IT person, the first thing you are going to want to do is re-establish this line of communication--to prevent a major melt down of any further communication between you and your friendly IT person.