The IT dept.

[thalaw2]

I can't stand incompetent IT!!!!!  Why do I need admin access just ot install Flash Player and Yahoo Messenger?!??!!?  Yeesh!  Everyone in the office is miserable.  I did IT for nearly 10 years for a college and a city and never had so many complaints!  I knew I shouldn't have let IT "fix" my computer.  Darn them and their new network printer that still doesn't work from my station!!!!!


/end rant

[Panther_Gunn]

Why do I need admin access just ot install Flash Player and Yahoo Messenger?!??!!?

Because "Power User" is a worthless permission level, and Microsoft refuses to accept that?

[GogglesPizanno]

Having worked on both sides of that rant I can officially say both sides are right, and all people when dealing with tech related matters... are in fact idiots at various times.

Flash player, that seems wacky to me.
Yahoo Messenger... well lets just say given a hypothetical example of say sales people, and adult content and well I kinda sorta understand that one 

[BWPS]

?

[MJB]

*cringes*

*still gets the heebie jeebies when he sees IT*

-MJB

[Lunarman]

More power to the standard user! Here, here!

It's actually something I'm campaigning for in my college. I think that when you reach the age of 18 you should be the one responsible for your user area on a network, and anything you put on it. Including flash player and such

[GogglesPizanno]

More power to the standard user! Here, here!

It's actually something I'm campaigning for in my college. I think that when you reach the age of 18 you should be the one responsible for your user area on a network, and anything you put on it. Including flash player and such

That's a solid foundation in theory...

[daglob]

Um, yeah, having worked at a Tech School, I must say that some 18-year olds are not competent to install a light bulb, much less a computer program (the same applies to some 20, 26, 34, 45, et cetera ad infinitum). It's frustrating for those who are competent enough to tie their shoes, but I do understand why they do it. One of the biggest problems we had was people taking their laptops home (See ads from Remington College), getting on the internet, and downloading "jabajaba software-it boost your network speed by 8000 percent", then coming to school and spreading malware or viruses to other computers, usually used by other students who may have erased their C drive to have more space for thier MP3s and games, or set their laptop up as a server, or printed porn to a printer that was set up as the default printer, but was in the room they were in the day before, or edited some of the Windows system files, zipped the contents of drive C, copy protected their hard drives, complained to the Dean of Education when the NTC cancelled their printing of a 500+ page book (I wish I'd seen that one-on tape after the fact), or sat under the security cam in the computer lab eating cereal for breakfast or let his pet squirrel eat his keys.

The problem you seem to have isn't with IT people, it's with incompetent IT people.

[thalaw2]

The problem you seem to have isn't with IT people, it's with incompetent IT people.

Yes.  This is exactly why I made it clear in my first sentence.  I jus luvs me some competent IT...people who know how to connect a network printer to a network and who know that flash player isn't malware.  Heck, people who know how to update the network when no one is in the office so that people working early in the morning aren't locked out of the network before they have to go to their morning classes!     I can't believe some of these guys are really MS certified.

EDIT:  Outlook is not the best thing to happen to email and I don't know why they force us all to use it for office email (we don't have passwords for our email accounts...they keep the passwords to themselves) and they probably don't know how to setup POP3 or whatever is being used now to access an office email account from home.

[GogglesPizanno]

True Story: At my recently no longer available job, the head of the IT dept... Like CIO guy, went on a business trip. Got word through the dept that some of the before mentioned sales guys had been surfing porn on the company network and got hit with some malware... they had a log of the sites. Now this guy is not one to go looking for porn, pretty straitlaced, but he felt the need to check out the sites to determine just HOW bad it was (company had a pretty stringent no porn or you are fired rule).

After going to the site his computer got infected and he started getting the spam popups "alerting" him that his machine was infected and that if he clicked the link it would take him to the software he could buy that would remove it.

The head of the IT dept, not only clicked the link, he used the company credit card to buy and install the software on his laptop. Needless to say you can guess the reaction when the "lowly" help desk guys got word of this and the need to fix his computer.

[daglob]

I apologize thalaw2; I ran some thoughts and answers together.

Goggles:
We had a guy put porn on another student's computer. I don't know how, but the NTC caught him (thkn it was shortly after we got the network up and running, and the NTC sometimes just looked to see what was going on), then made copies of the log and files transferred. He erased the files on the second student's computer (she was a rather petite young lady attending night classes), then he killed the first student's network account. When the first student came to the help desk to complain that he had lost internet access, it was explained to him that the people in the network department didn't want to be witnesses in a sexual harassment suit, and he needed to talk to the dean of education to get his network previleges back. That's another discussion I'd like to have seen, at a distance.

[Panther_Gunn]

I can't believe some of these guys are really MS certified.

Being MS certified doesn't mean you know how to deal with people (sadly, many times it's completely the opposite), know how to troubleshoot problems logically, know how to manage your time & schedule jobs efficiently, or even have much common sense (because, really, how much of Microsoft software is based on, or relies upon, common sense?).

EDIT:  Outlook is not the best thing to happen to email and I don't know why they force us all to use it for office email (we don't have passwords for our email accounts...they keep the passwords to themselves) and they probably don't know how to setup POP3 or whatever is being used now to access an office email account from home.

I'll tell you why they "force" you all to use it.  It's much easier to limit the customer to what they can use officially & then keep track of, monitor,  & manage that, than it is to cater to the needs of every single individual, learn the ins & outs of 3-5 times the amount of software than is really necessary (because who's usually the first people called when they can't figure something out & think their computer is broken??), monitor all of that extra software for updates, security risks, virus vulnerabilities, etc, and *still* keep the network uptime at a level that everyone is happy with and still have time to set up new machines & go on trouble calls.  Sometimes it's not incompetence, just proper time and resource management.

[daglob]

I'll tell you why they "force" you all to use it.  It's much easier to limit the customer to what they can use officially & then keep track of, monitor,  & manage that, than it is to cater to the needs of every single individual, learn the ins & outs of 3-5 times the amount of software than is really necessary (because who's usually the first people called when they can't figure something out & think their computer is broken??), monitor all of that extra software for updates, security risks, virus vulnerabilities, etc, and *still* keep the network uptime at a level that everyone is happy with and still have time to set up new machines & go on trouble calls.  Sometimes it's not incompetence, just proper time and resource management.

You have no idea how many complaints Admin got about the help desk crew because we wouldn't support Doom, Quake, Napster, and dozens of other programs that the student bought or downloaded themselves. Then there were the programs that we WERE required to support (which is why I ended up a specialist in a Distance Learning Program that no longer exists).

We hated Outlook, and were required by Administration to use it ourselves. Sometimes competent ITs are hamstrung by higher-ups. Think about what that does to the incompetent ones...

[thalaw2]

I guess it's that i just don't like Outlook.  I would prefer old skool Eudora or the new Thunderbird...heck i just like having some freedom. 

I totally agree with restricting access to other software that does nothing to increase productivity   That makes sense. 

[BlueBard]

Those of us who know understand that we just have to suffer with Outlook for official business.  The main reasons it is this way have to do with the tight integration between Outlook, Exchange, and to some extent Active Directory.  Exchange initially allowed people who had no business running a mail server to run a mail server.  When coupled with Outlook, it provided and still provides some pretty powerful groupware features like calendaring and scheduling that were integrated with the mail system.  Frankly, few companies did a better job of this and the ones that did lost traction because MS was in fact cheaper.  Outlook and Exchange is now so widely deployed throughout corporations worldwide that you couldn't blow it out of IT with nuclear weapons.

Most companies, however, won't block mainstream webmail sites.  So use your Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail accounts when you can.

And remember that because of hackers and malware authors and unsafe coding practices by the number one software company on the planet we now have IT departments whose job it is to provide you with a computer that, freshly installed, is completely useless.

[Panther_Gunn]

And remember that because of hackers and malware authors and unsafe coding practices by the number one software company on the planet we now have IT departments whose job it is to provide you with a computer that, freshly installed, is completely useless.

Any IT department that issues out computers with freshly installed (i.e.: not updated) software deserves all of the resultant crash & virus headaches they get.