Why are we dicks?

Imagine being hired as a subject matter expert but every piece of advice you give is ignored. Until something goes catastrophically wrong, now you are pulled into 3 different incident response meeting being blamed for it happening despite you raising the alarm for the past 6-12 months(but you can’t say that because it is non constructive and finger pointing), asking what is happening, when will it be fixed, and how to prevent it from happening again.
But here is the kicker, the incident started an hour ago and you have been in the meeting for the past 30 min with everyone pointing fingers at you and expecting answers from you but you haven’t even started proper troubleshooting because you were pulled into the meeting.

Then you ask for a budget to make the systems perform better. You spend 3 months gathering quotes, haggling prices, demoing products but when you lay out your proposal you get ‘That is too expensive or everything is running fine we don’t need that.’ Then next week the sales team say we will start using X software with a cost of 3x what you found and lacks features you must have to maintain your cybersecurity insurance and it gets approved.

This is not just one bad employer, that is across the world. Subject matter experts thought as cost centres and scapegoats.

Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department’s lab, and the lab should be his office.

Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that “Jane Doe” does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn’t have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn’t. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.

“my computer won’t turn on!!”

“is it plugged in?”

“hold on let me check…it’s hard to tell, the power’s out”

“…”

I once replaced an entire power strip because the user said that it would turn off at random. So I took it back to the IT room and plugged in all the things and watched it, thinking it would short out or blow a circuit breaker or something.

Then the user called me again saying the new strip was doing the same thing and I should replace it. So I schlepped up to their office and replaced it with a third one.

Then they called me again saying it keeps happening. So finally I looked at where they had put it and it was right where they’d put it when they pushed to back their chair up from the desk.

And they didn’t realize it.

I once spent 10 hours travelling from Toronto to Iowa (and back to Toronto) to flip a switch on a printer that multiple people had failed to figure out how to flip.

Yeah, I feel this one. It really only takes one time getting called in at 3am because half the city has lost internet due to a janitor unplugging a rack full of routers so he’d have a place to plug in his radio while he was mopping to turn into a dick.

Commutes should be paid work.

I had a site that was going down multiple days a week for a hour or two. Turns out a employee was unplugging the small rack surge strip to plug in their coffee maker. They also happened to be the person complaining the loudest about how incompetent IT was. For some reason what she did was understandable and not worthy of a write up. But me telling her not to touch anything connected to server rack was going over the line. She was gone within the year having finally made someone with more suction mad.

“Are you sure all the wires are connected, USB and power?” (Relating to a scanner.)

“Yes, I’ve checked several times.”

get there, USB is firmly connected but the power connector was hanging like 2cm belown the desk, clearly visible when you looked at the back of the scanner.

At that same trip dropped in to check a complaint about a broken DVD-drive. Turns out it didn’t read DVDs because it was a CD-drive.

Been doing IT for 20 years.

The one ray of hope is that the number of entirely tech illiterate people I deal with has decreased. They’re retiring/dying. It’s not nearly as common now to deal with people that don’t understand how to literally turn something on. I also got out of the private sector, so I’m not dealing with the general public, which always made me want to drive my car into oncoming traffic on my way home every day.

But yeah, I always make a point of embarrassing someone when I have to drive somewhere to do something a toddler could have done if they put them on the phone with me.

You can be as much of a dick as you want, so long as you are right, and can get shit done.

If you are the kind of IT supergenius that responds to a “my laptop won’t connect to the company network” ticket with “ok I’ll just remote into your laptop real quick”, you better the friendliest guy around.

It’s staggering how hopeless people are with basic tech, not even IT. I remember dealing with people who didn’t even know which black box was their computer and tried to convince me that because the monitor power light was on their computer must be on.

If you have to drive 3 hours to push a power button then that sounds like you’re way too far from the jobsite, aka a management problem where they’re trying to contract IT consultants nowhere near their business or hiring too few people who know how to work a button.

I had to walk across campus to plug in a woman’s monitor because she was irate that her PC wasn’t working. To be fair she was very contrite afterwards. I think the cleaning person knocked it out.