(no subject)

[stormdog]

I could write about the way I felt weirdly old on Thursday. I could write about my possibly terminally ill cat. And I probably will. But what I am going to write about is my job.

I was talking to mocha_mephooki a little bit on Thursday about the place I work and the things that are going on therein. It's weird; almost anything can seem positively reasonable from a position within it. But once you start talking about it to someone who isn't directly involved, you get a whole new perspective on it all. It's really astounding how much worse a given situation sounds, even to yourself, when you're trying to explain it all to someone who isn't directly involved.

I was going to write about it a bit at work, but realized that that probably wasn't a good idea; the resultant text may have been a bit too profanity-laden. I think it's fairly likely that most of my readership isn't interested in sorting actual content out of verbal explosions that cast doubt on the gender of the chosen sexual partners of iconic Catholic figures (not to mention ones that question the willingness of said partners or the techniques employed by said iconic figures), or that make suggestions about the possible coprophagic or pederastic predilections of my co-workers. No; instead, I'll try and leave all of that out and just let you focus on the actual occurrences that give rise to the desire for such outbursts.

But before I get to that, if you would, do me a favor. Read this and tell me whether you think I should be working where I am. Tell me if you think I can find a better job than this.

*deep breath*

So let me tell you about our infrastructure team. I'm sorry; let me tell you about what used to be our infrastructure team. They are the server-side counterparts to we help desk folk. We fix laptops and desktops; they work on servers. As well, they manage site to site connectivity, vpn connectivity to our clients, backup job scheduling, and other such tasks. They are mostly based in our Vermont office.

We used to have four people in the Infrastructure group. We'll call them S1 through S4. S1, the head of the team, left several months ago to become head of IT for a startup company somewhere. Ok, that makes sense. I understand it was a really great offer, and he was showing off pictures of the classic corvette he bought to my team lead.

So S2 became de facto head of the server team and he and S3, a relative newcomer who's been there about as long as I have continued to work in Vermont while S4, who's our VPN and backup scheduling person, stays where he is in the Washington State office. Life goes on. Resources are a little tight over there and they hire a contractor who's working with them in Vermont. He takes over the backup jobs from S4.

Then my company decides to close the Washington State office. Even though S4's ability to do his job is completely independent of geographic location (working from Washington, he sets up VPN tunnels from our Vermont office to clients around the country), our division VP decides that he doesn't want S4 working without being at an office. He can either relocate, of find a new job. S4 strings VP along (and, since we're pretty good friends, gleefully explains this to me) and makes it sound like he's considering moving (no chance in hell) until he gets an offer from another department within my company who have no problem at all with him working from home and leaves to join implementations.

So now we're down to two permanent people on the infrastructure team. Surely this can't last and the head count has to change, right? Right. But not in the direction I was expecting. S2 lets us know that he's had a really great offer made to him and has decided to take it. Interesting. So now we're down to S3 and the contractor doing all the server work. They're pretty swamped, of course, and a few contractors are hired who are working in the northern Illinois office with me.

Then, a couple days ago, S3, who is completely burned out at this point, puts in his resignation. Now this is getting really interesting. Once he leaves in a few weeks, we have no permanent infrastructure team members; they are all contractors. We may have finally hired a replacement for S1 though; he starts on Monday in my office.

Our escalation procedure has become, well, odd. we know there are all these contractors our there. We don't really know who's doing what among them. We send all server tickets to S3 who assigns them to the right contractor. Except that he sometimes gets requests that go directly to which he then forwards on to us at the help desk with the note that we should make a ticket out of them and send it to him. That irks me. He should either tell the submitter to send it to us so they learn what the procedure is supposed to be, or, if he's not willing to explain the correct process to clients, he should log the ticket his damn self. But I digress.

So people ask us about how to do something, or why something isn't being done and all we can do is either log a ticket and pass it on, or look up the open ticket (if there is one) and tell them who to email. No one seems to update the tickets at all so we can't give them status updates. The ticket sits open, open, open, and then closes with no real explanation. Ok, not our problem right? Well, supposedly. Some of our employees don't seem to think so. Some of them don't like hearing that we don't really know what's going on. Some of them complain. You might think that we could talk to our manager and have him work out a plan with the server team on how to handle this sort of thing.

Let me tell you about our manager. Or, really, managers. The help desk has had two of them since I've been there. We'll call them M1 and M2. M1 has no technical experience even though she's managing a help desk. She's a nice enough person, and a good organizer, and she can do some parts of the job really well. When it comes to technical aspects of her (and our) role, she basically lets us do what works best. That can be good, but it made it difficult for her to get some things across to the execs above us. When they made unreasonable demands on our time and asked for things that were difficult or impossible to deliver, she didn't always understand why that was. And because we are always being asked for things that are difficult or impossible to deliver, she got a little burned out between trying to understand what was being asked for and trying to explain why it couldn't happen.

A few months ago, she stepped down to do applications support to replace our applications support person who left to become a trainer in our Chicago office. So, we got a new manager; he was the head of a client facing help desk for a department that supports one of our software suites (most of that functionality was moved to our Vermont office, so he was sort of orphaned). This should be good, my team lead and I thought. He's had actually help desk management experience.

He might have been great for the role! We just haven't had a chance to find out. He's been out about fifty percent of the last few months with nerve problems that have developed in both arms. They're bad enough that they were keeping him from driving for a while. He said he'd try to work from home, but very frequently we wouldn't hear from him for days at a time, or even a whole week. He had surgery lately and has been in much more over the last two weeks, but for a while we were basically on our own.

That means that when the execs in Chicago decided that we were going to buy new computers from an entirely different company than the one we've been dealing with and that all the sales people were going to get them and that it had to be done OMG right now!, it was my team lead who was trying to explain why it couldn't be done quite so easily. Our manager participated a little bit, but was mostly out of the picture while the plan was taking shape.

For a while we were getting ticket after ticket from sales VPs saying that they needed their new computer now and that had approved this, and why wasn't it being done?! We just kept saying that our manager had not yet approved those systems being set up and that were unable to support them, then suggested they talk to our manager. Who, of course, couldn't be found most of the time. Maybe there was an advantage to having an absentee manager after all. Or not, as we were getting complaints directly from the company president by this point and come hell or high water, these systems were going to be built, deployed, and supported.

Then we found out that we were getting eight of these computers 'on loan' from the vendor and had to set them up right now for several people and sooner than right now for said president, who absolutely had to have one for a conference that weekend. So our team lead did his best to get one built from scratch with our corporate software and make everything work correctly on entirely new hardware. Then the president didn't understand what the problem was when things like weird application error messages or random hibernation were occurring. Gee, wish we could help, but apart from our team lead, we haven't even seen one of the damn things, let alone know how to troubleshoot them.

To this day, we are still fighting over how to get these things situated. Our finance department finally okayed the purchase of thirty five of them to upgrade more salespeople. At the same time, we were going to get the systems on loan back and swap them with systems that we actually owned and had support contracts on. Oh no, we absolutely can't do that; these guys can't afford to be without their computers for even a day to swap out! No, they can't even have a laptop shipped to them and be walked through the process of swapping hard drives out. No, they must keep the loaner machines, and we'll send back some of the ones we bought to the vendor. The person working with the vendor swears that this is ok with the vendor and that they will still honor support contracts on the loaner systems. I asked for some kind of written statement from the vendor to that effect, or at least for the name of someone I can talk to there if they won't support us, a few days ago. I'm not holding my breath for it. I'm also not looking forward to fighting with warranty support to convince them that we actually have contracts. It's bad enough spending an hour on the phone with our other vendor when I know we have a contract. For these new systems, I'm not even sure we do, and have no idea how to find out.

She also said that swapping the loaners for purchases systems would "turn her tracking system upside-down". I was very tempted to respond to that comment with instructions on how to use 'cut' and 'past' within an Excel spreadsheet.

Oh, our other vendor? We are continually being told that the on-site service agreements we buy with every damn one of our laptops are not in their system. I have spent multiple hours on the phone with them and even referenced the reseller that we bought the hardware and warranty through. I can get them to send out a technician anyway most of the time and have been doing that for a year now, but a few days ago I got a certified letter from their billing department with four service invoices in it. There's no way in hell I've had time to call them up this week and spend hours on the phone sorting them out, so I've ignored them. I should mention too that their definition of next day service is a very loose one. It ranges from 'two days out' to 'the part should be in within the month' to simply never hearing back. An estimate that ten percent of service calls are resolved within our service plan's SLA would be a generous one.

But let me go back to the software side of things. As interesting as I find it that someone with little technical background is doing applications support work, she did fine. She was doing a number of things: administration of our ticketing system, support for Project Server, support for our sales activity tracking system, and support for our time and expense tracking system, Microsoft Solomon. I was very happy to be able to send all those tickets over to her and not have to deal with them. Ah, for the good old days.

She got burned out too. On top of all the other stuff she was doing, she was in charge of managing the migration from our old corporate financial tracking system to our new one. (Like I said, she has little tech background, but is a good organizer.) Her project was the victim of various problems like people leaving and changing budgets, and she got pretty behind through no fault of her own. By the time it was done, she was about done herself. She was planning to leave the company. Instead, they talked her into taking a two month sabbatical.

So, she left. I was expecting that she was going to come by the help desk and explain how to do all of the things that she did so we could take over. Interestingly enough, her last day passed by without such a meeting taking place. She did leave a few documents, including a synopsis of what systems she used to take care of and who had the responsibility now that she's gone. I was informed of the existence of those documents the Wednesday after the Friday of her leave-taking. Well, better late than never I suppose.

So I took over administrative duties of the ticket tracking system. I've already had to call the vendor for support once, and they were very helpful and got me fixed up. Still, dealing with the learning curve of that plus setting up conferencing system accounts plus trying to get a handle on the changing of the new hire system has left me a bit short on time. (I'll get to the new hire/contractor idiocy in a few.)

So of course, everybody and their brother starts wanting conferencing system accounts to be set up, so I have to start figuring that out, and fast! My understanding is that we, the help desk, are going to handle gathering information prior to account creation, then sending that info on to our telco manager for setup, who's doing it while our manager-turned-apps person is on sabbatical. She will be taking care of tickets that involve questions about or problems with the systems too. Well, we split up duties between ourselves and I got that one, along with the call tracking system. I can get a handle on that, right? I mean, how hard could it be? I was about to find out.

I'd been sending these tickets over to her for a couple of weeks. Things seemed to be goking well. Hadn't hear any complaints. Then I was told that our telco manager is too busy to take care of these tickets anymore and that we would have to do them ourselves. As well, all the open ones should be moved over into our queue. Okay, I start doing that. I find that every ticket we've sent her since the thirty-first has been sitting in her queue with no action whatsoever. Well; guess who has some extra work to do?

So I begin trying to figure out how these systems work. It appears that we have three separate conferencing systems; we'll call them A, B, and C. System A is usable by the whole company. System B may or may not be usable by the whole company, and system C is usable only by people in offices that aren't part of a company we acquired last year; I'll call them company B. However, when someone asks to be set up for any one of these systems, our policy is to set them up for all three on the assumption that the person asking for them has no clue what the hell they want. With our user base, this is a sadly defensible assumption.

So I look at how to get these things set up. System A involves collecting names and certain other info and sending them on to a third party for accounts to be created. I can do that. System B and C are ones that I actually used to set up accounts for way back when I first started, before we had a separate applications person. I should be able to do those too.

Well, 50/50 isn't too bad, right? Turns out that while I have no problem setting up accounts for system C, I no longer have an account for system B. I contact our telco manager, who is the one who is going to be dealing with troubleshooting these systems to ask for a name and password. She tells to check with my team lead. He has no clue. I check with her again and she says she'll look into it and let me know. I checked with the other support techs; none of them have a login either. I emailed our telco manager again today, but haven't heard back, so at this point, I'm cheerfully ignoring requests for set up of accounts on system C. I don't know who the hell's problem it is right now, but it's clearly not mine.

At this point, I am beginning to wonder just what our telco manager does all day, because as far as I can tell, it's something that doesn't involve any entries in our ticket tracking system or communication with any of us, yet it keeps her way too busy to do account setups.

So these things start building up in my queue as I try to keep three separate tasks for each individual ticket straight and remember who was what and who's still waiting. A couple tickets come in that involve problems with the system and I send them on to our telco manager.

Early this week, at the suggestion of our manager, I worked with our help desk tech in Vermont on the process for conference account setups (at least, as much as I could of them; still waiting on that name and password for system B) and started sending those tickets over to him because he's a little under worked out there. My stress levels start to do down again as my queue goes back down to the mid thirties from the mid forty to fifty range.

Then I get an email from our telco manager saying that with the sales meeting coming up, she doesn't have time to work these other tickets either (the second level conferencing stuff) and that that should go to our Vermont tech as well. I confirm this with our manager (he okays it) and I send all those tickets over to him as well. Now, this is stuff that I have no clue how to fix, and I've been there two years. He's been there a few months. I offer to do what I can to help, but tell him that if he gets stuck, he's going to have to talk to our telco manager. May God have mercy on his soul.

To add insult to injury, I got a note from the telco manager after opening a termination ticket saying that 'these tickets are supposed to go to the Vermont tech'. Now, the ticket was not in her name, but termination tickets generate a number of 'tasks', which are like sub-tickets. Those tasks are usually automatically assigned. In this case, some of them went to her, as dictated by a rule set up before our apps person left and with no input from us. So not only does telco manager not seem to have time to do any of her job, but she does not know the difference between an incident and a task, and does not understand that these are automatically assigned. I sigh and change the template to auto-assign to the Vermont tech, and check to see how many she has open in her queue. Once again, I see that she has tasks dating through to the thirty-first that she has taken no action on. She hasn't done a goddamn think with them. I begin to wonder how to get this kind of job.

You know, this is really long, and at this point, I haven't even made it to the miasma that is our in-progress integration with the company we bought last year (about a year in and we still have, essentially, entirely separate IT systems, at least on the level that I deal with), or to the group that ordered fourteen twenty-two inch widescreen flat panels for themselves without checking to see if their computers will support the full resolution (and who now want upgraded computers), or to the joke that was the attempt to move the help desk to a new PO system. (Did I mention we do POs?) God/dess that's an entry in itself. And so are the morons who call to complain that we haven't gotten back to them on a ticket that's been waiting for their response for two days, and the people who won't call in their own tickets (their admins do it for them) so we can't troubleshoot with them, and the people who want us to support their laptop after they loaded Vista on it without asking us first (nice try; we reimage them to XP when that happens), or countless other things.

But I think that's enough for now.

Tell me; can I find something better than this? I like this sort of work. I like working within a system. I'm detail oriented and like either having good doc for what I do or producing good doc for what I and others do. I think I'd be a good level two tech even though I've been at Allscripts for two years without a change of title (though I think I'm technically doing level two work constantly). I'd like to have a chance to grow and move up within my department and organization. Not too high; no interest at all in management, but I'd like to be doing level two or three support. Or, even better, be doing server and networking work. I love networking and loved my Cisco classes. I'd kill to be playing with routing and networking.

Can I find a better job than this?