Author: Mark Alexander

This one’s mostly for me, to help sort out the exact reasons why I told my previous employer to go take a hike. The reason I’ve been giving when asked is, “Lack of Leadership,” but that’s only a small part of it.

When I started at the place that will henceforth be known as Head-in-the-Sand Central, it was a godsend. We’d moved to Denver two months earlier, and while Ben had guaranteed employment secured beforehand, I had thrown my very stable and secure life up in the air to move here and despite my experience and history, had been unable to find work. After two months of filling out application after application with nothing to show for it, when I got a call from a temp agency (the same agency who’d placed me at my previous job in Phoenix that ended up lasting seven years) for this “emergency” 3-month contract position, I was literally down to my last ten dollars.

I’m starting to fear that I may be faced with that situation again, because despite submitting countless applications online, I’ve only managed to secure a single bonafide face-to-face interview since August—and that was an unmitigated disaster. I’ve had a couple very good phone interviews, one of which is supposed to be followed by a face-to-face sometime this week, but despite the number of “available” jobs, it’s been pretty slim out there. What I don’t understand is that my resume is almost a bullet point match for most of these positions’ posted requirements—and yet I’ve heard nothing—other than the couple of outright rejection emails I’ve received. (This does not come as a complete surprise because about a year ago I got a response to one application I submitted just after we moved here.)

About the only people I have heard from are the questionable Indian placement agencies that have vacuumed my resume off the job boards that I absolutely refuse to deal with.

But back to Head-in-the-Sand Central, I had a bad feeling from the moment I walked in. But let’s face it—at that point desperation had set in and I leapt at the opportunity to get back to work without even having to go through the interview process. Even when the reason for this “emergency” became clear (my predecessor had been fired the day before amid a meltdown of both their mail and file servers), I chose to ignore the warning klaxons going off in my head. Even if it was only a 3-month contract, it was a paycheck and we needed to get the hell out of that pot-infused hotel and resettled!

I came to HITSC with a set of “best practices” in place that I learned at my previous job. Nothing about the company spoke best practices of any kind, and more than once I found myself wondering, “How does this place stay in business?” There was no documentation, no inventory tracking, and next to no I.T. standards and procedures. HIPAA compliance on the desktop was laughable. “What do you mean I have to lock my workstation?”

I soon learned that not only were there approximately 20 single-purpose servers (for a company of only about 300 employees), the majority of them were aging, desktop class machines. The mail server that crashed prior to my arrival (and to this day remains tied into the system—though no longer active in that role—because no one knows all its dependencies and is too frightened to simply disconnect it outright) is a seven-year-old Dell desktop. The domain server was an 11-year old 512MB Dell desktop running Windows 2000. (That server was finally virtualized onto proper HP hardware after it crashed last summer, but they didn’t want to spend the time or money to upgrade it to Server 2008, so it’s still running Windows 2000.)

Okay, I thought, this stuff can be fixed. The mail server and the file server had to be replaced because of their outright failure. (There had been no reliable, trusted backup, of course.) But what I soon realized was that management had a strange attitude of not only resistance, but outright denial that anything was wrong with the existing infrastructure. Seriously?

Tom (my boss) the I.T. Director, brought in an outside consulting firm to help clean up this mess, and to their credit they came with some really good ideas. But again, the push-back from management was palpable—especially when presented with the cost of making things right.

You would think that a company lives and dies by providing reliable services that demand data integrity to outside companies would be a little more concerned that their infrastructure was held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and chicken wire. But no! Maybe I’m crazy, but $65,000 in hardware and another few thousand in billable time to get this mess cleaned up did not seem out of line to me.

And don’t even get me started on the connection between the Denver and Colorado Springs offices—supposedly a multiple T1 pipeline that has the actual throughput of a dialup connection. And they wonder why things don’t work.

Anyhow, I got along well with Tom; we both were in agreement as to the critical nature of getting this disaster-waiting-to-happen cleaned up. He also convinced the company that they needed me full time to handle the day-to-day desktop support of the company (they had at one point been considering outsourcing that to the network consultants as well) and I was hired on as a full employee. The first few months went well, even if I was making significantly less money for more work than I’d been in Phoenix. I could deal with the little annoyances I encountered and much like my previous supervisor, Tom “got” me.

Needing the kind of organization to maintain my own sanity that was sorely lacking in this company, I began creating documentation for all desktop-related procedures, including the standard PC builds and general troubleshooting guides. I also brought the inventory tracking expertise I had gathered at my previous job to bear—and for the first time in what I understood was forever, the accounting department actually had everything they needed in that regard when it was time for their annual audit.

Then my boss quit. Or was forced to quit.  I don’t remember the exact circumstances but I think he’d probably reached the end of his rope with upper management and their ridiculous expectations of what was to be accomplished with no resources. It was only after he left that I realized the enormous amount of stupid he was able to deflect off our department from everyone else higher up the organizational ladder and my job was never the same again. We were without an I.T. Director for six months as the people with the Os in their titles took their sweet time to make sure they got the perfect replacement.

During this time, a lot of the crap Tom had previously dealt with fell into my lap. And when the chicken-wire-and-duct-tape infrastructure started fraying, it was my fault responsibility to fix it. Thankfully the network consultants and I had developed a good working relationship at this point and I was able to call upon them for assistance, because a lot of what I had to deal with was definitely outside my skill set. Yet management asked why I wasn’t able to fix this crap myself.

It’s because I’m a Desktop Tech, not a Network Administrator, assholes!

It was also during this time that after receiving numerous kudos for my customer service that I started getting called out about my attitude. Little wonder, when the overwhelming impression I started receiving was the company viewed me more as a necessary evil than an asset when I couldn’t fix this crap by myself.

As I tell people, I’m a Desktop Tech. I like being a Desktop Tech. It’s what I do. I hope to retire as a Desktop Tech. I don’t have the full skill set of a Network Administrator nor do I particularly want it. I have no desire to become a Network Administrator beyond doing basic stuff like adding/removing users and simple Active Directory maintenance. I deal with everything on this side of the wall, and the Administrators deal with everything behind the wall. All of my supervisors to date have gotten that, and in fact have fostered it. The COO and pretty much everyone else at Head-in-the-Sand Central did not. The overwhelming attitude I got from almost everyone who worked at that company was “if it plugs in, it’s your responsibility.”

To illustrate this, at one point someone showed up in my cube one day to tell me one of the microwave ovens in the break room wasn’t working. “What do you want me to do about it?” I asked, incredulously. The response? “Well, you’re I.T. aren’t you?” I told her to talk to the office manager.

I’m convinced the COO—despite being able to “talk the talk” really didn’t have a clue what anyone in I.T. actually did. I know for sure that after Tom left she didn’t know specifically what I did. Furthermore, she didn’t seem to trust anyone in tech to begin with. I don’t know if she’d been continually lied to in the past or just had an untrusting nature to begin with, but after Tom’s departure at one point she asked if I thought the network consultants knew what they were doing. I told her I did. It turns out she asked the same question—about me—to the network consultants! What? Did she think we didn’t talk?

There’s a reason that during the summer without leadership I started channeling all her emails into a folder called The Stupid, it Burns!

It was kind of rocky when they finally hired Tom’s replacement, if only because once again I had to go through the whole proving myself while simultaneously training him thing—making it damn clear what my strengths, my weaknesses, and my boundaries—were. In the end, we developed a decent relationship and like Tom, he “got” me and leveraged my skills appropriately—even if, as he reported to the COO at one point, did not think I was indispensable…unlike the two data analysts in the department.

I even reached the point that I felt comfortable enough to vent my general frustrations about the company with him. (It always seemed there was a distinct level of distrust percolating through the entire company, so this was noteworthy.) During one of our weekly one-on-ones, I asked him how he dealt with the stress and the continual feeling of banging one’s head against the wall in regards to getting anything accomplished there. He surprised me by opening up and confessing that he was going through the same things.

When I heard that, I knew it would only be a matter of time until the announcement came down from on high that Chris was “leaving to pursue other opportunities.”

And almost right on cue, it happened less than a month later. I’d sworn that if I were ever again in the target-on-my-back position I’d been in the previous summer, I would quit. I didn’t. I absolutely loathe looking for work, and this camel’s back can carry quite a load before it snaps. But the stress started adding up, and by the time it started manifesting as physical pain I knew something was going to have to give.

I hung on through the summer. In June they found an “interim” I.T. Director who—like all the ones who had come before—had a ton of good ideas to get the place in order and was actually getting some of those things accomplished (much to my total shock and surprise). I genuinely liked Jason, and by the time that fateful morning two months ago arrived, we’d talked enough and gotten to know each other to such a degree that he didn’t seem at all surprised when that final straw broke the camel’s back and I tendered my resignation. I believe his exact words were, “I understand completely.”