Ten-cent words

On the way to work today, I found a dime on the sidewalk.

When I got in, I had a voicemail message from a user complaining about a misbehaving software package. I didn't know for sure, but I was 99.9% certain it was user error, by which I mean the user's birth was an error, and many years after the fact he is wasting the minutes of storage on my voicemail account on a stupid non-issue entirely formed from his own fevered imagination.

I pick up the phone and call his co-worker, somebody competent, and ask him to take a look at whatever the user is complaining about. He tells me that if he can't figure it out himself, he'll call me, and to otherwise consider the matter solved. This user is so bad, other people know just how little this guy can use his computer.

I go on with my day, and I eventually pass Co-worker in the hall. "Problem's solved," he tells me. "Turns out he was trying to open Version 6." Version 6 hasn't been running for three weeks now. We spent $10,000 upgrading the entire department to Version 7. It was a Big Deal. Further insult is the fact that this guy is in charge of that department. You'd think he'd have a vague recollection in his mind of all the work his department had been doing for the last month, getting ready for the switchover, switching over, and recovering from the switchover. But no. This guy thinks that Version 6, for some reason, is still fine and dandy. I shrug at Co-worker. He understands. I make a mental note to obliterate all traces of Version 6 from the user's machine at the first convenience. I already removed its shortcuts from the Desktop and from the Start Menu, but apparently he found more. I will be much more thorough next time.

In the hallway, several minutes later, I pass the user. He's blunt, and in typical top-executive style, lying just to look good. "Hey. I fixed it."

Like hell you did.

Interspersed with these moments, I spent my morning installing a new printer in the President's Office, which was quite an endeavor, considering that there hasn't been any new technology added to that department in seven years. Phone, fax, printer, PC, second phone. That was the equipment roster for the last president. The new one is decidely more savvy. While her communications needs are more demanding, they are not unreasonable they are merely contemporary. The last president made TV's Mr. Burns look trendy: "You there! Fill it up with petroleum distillate. And revulcanize my tires post haste!"

I spoke to her, or rather she spoke to me first, and we had a conversation that was simultaneously more engaging and honest than every conversation I've ever had with the last president. This one gets it. "You're a staff of one," she told me straight-forwardly, "What do you do?" I replied: "Everything."

A single utterance from each of us had acknowledged something between the most superior person in the company and me. She recognized that one person alone cannot make this place run. She didn't click her heels together and make the problem go away, but she recognized it, something the last president wouldn't have understood if you strapped him to a chair and made him watch an hour of Sock Puppet Theatre Presents: "I'm No Superman: A Play in Three Acts". I imagine his logic went something like "We have one IT guy and we're not paying for another. Therefore, everything will be OK on the IT front."

Let's hope we see some improvement in the coming months. Communication with management surely shouldn't be a roadblock anymore. Certainly not as much of one.