gotjenkins.com

Today is August 16th. I am sitting in the passenger seat of my car, and Laura is driving. Where are we going? Indiana, for DMB. It’s 9:15 St. Louis time, although I don’t know if we’ve crossed into eastern daylight time yet. It’s taken a lot of work thus far to get to this point.

Let’s start from the beginning, I guess. The week of July 23rd sucked for me. Sucked alot. In ten years of working where I work, it’s probably the worst straight week I’ve ever had. I’ve had bad days and bad runs of days, but something about this week in particular really was just shitty. People at the top were fighting about stupid crap all week. Egos were clashing – and when I say egos, I mean the kind of giant bullshit self important egos that can alter the earth’s gravitational pull and effect the rotation of the moon. Since shit runs downhill, it wound up dragging my boss and our office into it, really tanking morale for at least myself and her. This went on pretty much all week about shit that was so unimportant I don’t think I can remember all the details.

Well anyhow, for whatever reason I was working a little late on Friday the 27th. I got a phonecall from someone in my office who was driving home – apparently, two other people from our office were pulled over to the side of the road with what looked like car troubles. The person who called me passed it too quick and wasn’t able to stop, so she called me to make sure that I pay attention when I’m leaving to see everything is OK.

A little bit later, I leave. I’m passing the area where they’re supposed to be pulled over, and I see a silver truck I don’t recognize. It looks like things are pretty much under control, so I just continue on. I go home, get Laura, and we leave to go get dinner.

We’re driving down Hampton, and it’s raining. Not a lot, but still raining. As we near the intersection where we’re going to be making a left, someone who isn’t paying any attention pulls out of a little side street and makes a left turn into the lane that I’m driving in. I see her coming and try to move, and it helps a little bit, but ultimately she hits the rear driver side corner of my car and sends me spinning into oncoming traffic. I saw her coming towards me, which was good, as I started to move out of the way, but I just didn’t make it in time. Had I not seen her coming, she would have hit my driver’s side door and put me in the hospital.

For the folks playing the home game, this is what we call ‘Karma.’ Had I stopped to check on Elaine, whose car was broken down, that gal would have hit some other chump when she wasn’t paying attention.

Anyway, my car seems drivable, so I pull into the parking lot of a nearby bank. She pulls in as well, and immediately comes up to exchange information. I start writing down my info, and Laura calls the police. It turns out that this driver is an out of state driver from Texas driving a rental car. On top of it, she was totally pushy and impatient trying to get away from the scene of the accident that she caused – hey, sorry if you’re inconvenienced by this, maybe next time you should watch what the fuck you’re doing.

Checking out the cars, I don’t seem to be in too bad of a condition. Ghetto but drivable. The bumper is totally screwed. It’s two thirds of the way ripped off the back of my car, and I have some visible body damage to the driver’s side rear quarter panel. Our friendly accident causing pain in the ass fully documented and detailed the damage to my vehicle by taking some cell phone camera pictures of my car from a bad angle at a distance of about 20 feet away. Just in case I try to screw her insurance company or something.

Turns out that she doesn’t have proof of insurance. According to her you don’t get insurance cards in texas, you get a window clingy that shows you are insured. She also didn’t have the contact information of her insurance agent, but left me her cell phone number that I could call if I have problems. Fucking sweet.

She bitched and bitched that she had to wait for the cops, because she was busy busy and didn’t have time for this. The cops finally got there (and pulled into the lot in such a way that it blocked both of our cars in.) Cop gets out, takes statements from both of us, and tells impatient bitch that she’s free to go, and that she (the officer) will verify the accident was bitch’s fault if I need her to. Great. That’s at least promising. So then the gal gets back in her car and looks impatient waiting for the cop to move her car. What do I do? I walk over to the police car and start asking questions – after all, I’ve never been in a situation like this before and I have lots of questions about how all of this works. Naturally, our Texan friend looks visibly upset that we’re keeping her there, and makes mean mean faces at me. I think at one point she may have even honked, but I don’t remember.

That’s how we do it in Texas.

Lately, I’m an interesting combination of IT guy and accountant (read: geek and nerd) with this job of mine. While I do perform a lot of accounting functions, more and more I’m picking up IT responsibilities to go along with it. All of this is fine; after all, my bachelor’s degree is in MIS, so it’s nice to feel like I’m actually using the five years of college I endured.

The experience of being kind of a hybrid techie/bean counter has really given me a new perspective – and perhaps a new respect – for both sides of the fence.

No matter where you work, the company line that everyone is expected to tow always sounds a little bit like ‘We’re all part of the same team and we should be acting in the best interest of the company.’ Anyone who is really a part of it, though, knows fully well the the team mentality sounds great in theory, but often deteriorates into ‘our’ team and ‘their’ team. Generally, this mentality often happens when you are dealing with the IT department and, well, anyone else.

Let’s face it – it’s not their fault. IT has a responsibility to make things work and keep them working. So when you have dozens of different ‘user’ departments, consisting of potentially hundreds of individual workstations and systems, it isn’t rare for everything to break at once. Then the IT guy has to prioritize who’s problems to fix when, all in the face of all the users bitching about how their problem is the most important and needs to be taken care of right away. Compound this with a general end-user skill level of ‘I don’t know dick’ and it’s easy to see how us vs. them comes into play – IT guys don’t have the time to educate, and users don’t have any desire to understand. Studies show that IT professionals are highly stressed (if not THE most highly stressed) and this explains why.

We’re in the midst of preparing for an upgrade of our accounting system this week. Additionally, we are converting from a client-install setup to terminal services (just in case you lost the decoder ring: moving from installing software on each individual computer to remote access of the server itself.) Typically, this is a really bad idea – doing both of these things at once means that we will have a much harder time diagnosing problems once we go live. Is it terminal services? Is it the new version of the software? Is it a combination? Who the hell knows?

In for a penny, in for a pound; Regardless of how we got here, we’re here.

Perhaps the hardest part of this process – and what I am absolutely talking about when I say it’s interesting being in the middle – is determining user setup and group policy on the terminal server. All of our users have admin rights on their win2K/winxp workstations, but in terminal services we restrict the access to only the things that they need. So things like the control panel are out, my computer is out, access to c: is out, et cetera. As we move along, it kind of becomes a fight between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’.

From the IT point of view, we want to restrict the terminal server as much as possible so that people can’t screw it up (because people *will* screw it up.)

From the user point of view, back up the damn server daily if you have to, but give me the access I need so that I can do my work – don’t leave me with some crippled half-assed system that doesn’t do what I need it to do, especially when it worked before the ‘upgrade.’

Which point of view is right? Hard to tell. Your users are technically internal customers, so I’m not sure it’s right to break the systems they need to do their jobs. At the same time, your users are often idiots about technology and need to be protected from themselves before they accidentally render said systems useless. A delicate and fragile balance, indeed. If users aren’t willing to adapt and techies aren’t willing to educate and help and be flexible, all you’re going to get is a god damn mess.

Personally, I don’t want to make any more work for the IT staff than necessary, but at the same time, I want to have the kind of functionality that I’ve come to expect from my systems. I can’t think of a good reason to have a software system that is less functional after an ‘upgrade,’ but that’s just me. I tend to think that there needs to be a little bit of common sense, a little bit of cooperation, and a little bit of willingness to evolve for things to really work out well. IT departments need to have a little flexibility and a little extra patience, and end users need to be willing to make some changes to their procedures – that handwritten list of steps you use to run a report in version 2.4 won’t work for shit in version 5.5, so you need to be prepared to run it ‘the new way.’

Let’s be honest – the ‘new way’ is probably better anyway.