Category: Work

My contract at the government agency I've called home for the last 28 months was terminated yesterday.

This is not completely surprising. While I'm not sure (and will probably never know) why this happened, I do have my suspicions.

About a month ago I found a solution to the "A referral was returned by the server" as well as "The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation" errors that have been plaguing us on Win10 systems while trying to install some agency-written software since I first started working there. I shared this with the team and thought that was the end of it. Prior to finding the registry modification solution, we had to remove the machine from the domain, perform the installation, and then rejoin it.

Two weeks ago I got an email from my supervisor asking where I found this registry solution. "Google," was my response.

Then, yesterday morning we all received this email:

Team,

 About a month ago this solution was suggested.   While the solution below helps us to quickly resolve issues for our customers, it is a violation of security policy.

 If you are having problems installing this application or other access issues, please bring it to my attention and I will work with management on getting a resolution for you.

 All possible solutions need to be vetted by IP.

All I can figure out is that because I dared to think outside the box and find a fix (that actually reset to the group policy default after rebooting) to the problem that was not being addressed by Infrastructure Protection, I had committed that violation of security policy—evidently grounds for immediate dismissal.

Anyhow I received a couple of panicked phone calls/texts from my recruiter after I left for the day and finally got in touch with her last night around 8 pm.

Supposedly no reason was given to her for my contract termination. The manner in which this was done was also not surprising; I'd witnessed similar with other contractors. One day they're there, and the the next they're gone, followed up by a generic "So and so is no longer employed by the agency."

My biggest concern was retrieving my personal possessions. The recruiter said, "I'll coordinate to have your things returned. They don't want you back on campus." All she was concerned about was getting my access badge (like it hadn't been disabled the moment I left the building yesterday) cell phone, and laptop, so after explaining that the phone and laptop were both in my office, we agreed to meet this morning at the local Starbucks to hand off the badge and parking permit.

While waiting for her to arrive, I reached out to my colleagues and asked that they gather my stuff up. Unsurprisingly they hadn't heard of my dismissal at that point, but after verifying it with our supervisor they went through my desk and got everything together. After coordinating with my department H.R. rep, I was able to pick everything up a couple hours later.

Interestingly, yesterday morning—well ahead of any of this going down—I must've tapped into something because after them both laying dormant for the last year, I reactivated both my monster.com and my indeed.com profiles and uploaded new resumes.

I did this because I was so totally disgusted with the official reaction to solving this ongoing problem (this was not the first time a suggestion for improving a process had been shot down in spectacular fashion). I was done.

When my good friend Cindy learned of this turn of events, she extended an offer to hire me to set up her daughter's home office tech and to help her transfer years of photos from a half dozen naked hard drives onto her Mac. (Something she swears she was thinking of doing prior to any of this happening.) Needless to say, my day is booked tomorrow.

Because you may get it…

In addition to the other project I'm involved in at work, and because I'm 95% of the way to solving their issues, I have now been tasked with upgrading our video department's Macs to High Sierra and getting them to play nice on our Windows domain. Apparently I am the only person in this entire organization who has any real knowledge of MacOS. The level of apathy—if not outright disgust—I have received from the Enterprise Networking and Infrastructure Protection departments is astounding. I don't care if you personally don't like Macs or that they're "too much trouble." We've been directed to add them to our network by people way above your pay grade so fucking get over yourselves and assist me! (I have the complete backing of my supervisor, my supervisor's supervisor, and his supervisor—who is in charge of those assholes as well—so don't be giving me any crap or I will cut a bitch by proxy!)

Since before I worked at DISH and was there only tangentially exposed to Macs in the Enterprise, I had fantasized about working for a shop that was all or mostly Apple—if for no other reason I was suffering profound burnout with Windows and it would be a great opportunity to do something different. Never mind it would look great on a resume.

It's been a struggle getting these machines to behave, and it has definitely been a learning experience, but not an unpleasant one. One important fact I learned was that most problems can simply be solved by upgrading the OS. These Mac Pros were on an early iteration of Sierra and network drive aliases were constantly disappearing and refusing to reconnect after rebooting. I upgraded to the latest version of High Sierra after binding them to our domain and the problem completely disappeared.

I'm certainly no expert at any of this, but at least I know the right questions to ask and know how to use the Google.

There are a lot of things that automatically work and you take for granted in the Windows world, but when you throw Apple into the mix it seems everything has to be specifically spelled out. It's not that difficult; it's just a lot of moving parts to keep track of, especially when you have multiple users logging into the same machine.

It's still not completely sorted out, but I'm almost to the point where I can cut one of the machines loose for testing and let the users tell me what breaks.

(But yeah, I'd still like to work in a Mac shop…)

And I'm here by myself, with both coworkers again being "on leave" at the last minute.

I knew from looking at my supervisor's calendar earlier this week that they'd be gone yesterday, but there was nothing about either of them being gone today as well. I guess that's one of the perks of being a beloved FTE who has worked ONE PLACE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE; you get to magically extend your paid leave with little or no notice.

I can just imagine what would happen if I tried that. Nevermind that as a contractor I have no paid or holiday leave (and I only have a meager amount of sick time because of a new Arizona law that went into effect last July). "Uh Mark, there have been some staffing changes, and we've notified your agency that your services will no longer be required." Yeah, we've seen that script played out many times over the nearly two years I've worked here.

Oh well. There was literally nothing going on yesterday, and based on how empty the parking lot was when I rolled up I doubt much will be happening today either. Heck, all the lights were off in my section of the building when I arrived…

What I've learned over the past two years contracting as a PC Tech at a state agency:

All you really need to survive here is to basically show up for work and don't piss anyone off.

Expediency, efficiency, and providing good customer service are not requisite—and in some cases are actively discouraged in spite of their newly adopted bullshit continuous improvement "Kaizen" initiative.

And lastly, it's all about power. Power over people. Power to control. Fiefdoms abound.

A few examples:

Unlike every. other. place. I've worked, we don't have complete rights to the tools within Active Directory. We can no longer delete computers (sometimes necessary to troubleshoot them dropping off the network), nor can we change users' groups or permissions. ALL OF THAT requires generating a ticket to the Service Desk, who then routes it to Access Management, where it can languish for weeks before being addressed.

Just last week I had a device that had fallen off the network. This particular customer is already a PITA, so I wanted to get it fixed right away. I went to delete the object from AD and I got an error that I didn't have rights. What the hell? I'd done this dozens of times before. So I apologized to the customer, went back to my desk, called the Service Desk and asked them to delete it.

They didn't have permission. So I called Access Management and spoke to one of the drones there. She wanted to know why I wanted the object deleted and recreated, and after an extended discussion she agreed that needed to be done and supposedly deleted and recreated it.

I returned to the customer's desk and attempted to rejoin the domain. Same error. At this point I said fuck it, and returned to my desk, created a new object with the same asset tag number and an "L" designation (for laptop) instead of "T" (for tablet). I returned to the customer's desk, renamed the machine and finally got it rejoined and back online. Was it kosher? No. Was the customer happy? Yes.

We also got chewed out yesterday for occasionally making users local administrators on their machines. This is sometimes necessary to  install software under their profiles, or to allow software to run properly. (Surefire way of telling if it's a permissions issue is for me to check it under my profile. If it runs fine there but not under the customer's, it's a permissions issue.)

Apparently we aren't supposed to do this. (I can't find this spelled out in any documentation anywhere.) If someone needs local admin rights there has to be written justification and—you guessed it—a ticket generated for Access Management to move the person into the proper security group. My question is this: how much damage can a local administrator really do, other than completely fucking up their own machine? They don't have rights to mess with anything on the network, so worst case scenario would be that a machine would have to be reimaged. I guess it's another one of the many on-the-fly directives that have gone into effect without notifying the people affected. Anyhow, we were informed that if this happened again there would be disciplinary action!

Whatever, bitch. Whatever.

And as one final example of the bullshit "continuous improvement" initiative, at every other place I've worked, I've kept a couple "spare" ready-to-deploy computers around to swap out in the event of an emergency. I suggested this to my boss and it was immediately shot down. "Oh, we can't just have state equipment sitting around." Oh no…if a machine goes down it has to be picked up, sent to Hardware for repair/reimaging, picked up from there and then transported back; a process that normally takes 2-3 days. God forbid I should be able to swap out a piece of equipment in less than an hour and allow the customer to continue working. Efficiency? NOT AT THIS PLACE.

Lastly, in the area of Customer Service, I am appalled at what passes for it around here. One of my coworkers (let's call her Maria) is a lifer. The woman is in her 40s, and this place is the only place she's ever worked. She crosses every "t" and dots every "i". She has paper copies of everything she's ever worked on locked away in file cabinets in case anything she's done is questioned. EVERYTHING she does has a process, and if something requires thinking outside that process, you can almost see the hard drive light in the middle of her forehead flashing wildly, not being able to access the data. And yet in spite of all these years of "service," her lack of knowledge about basic tech stuff is flabbergasting. There's no curiosity, no initiative. And never mind her complete lack of customer service skills:

Projector stops working. I pick up the ticket.

"Oh, we don't support that. Tell the customer to contact the vendor directly."

"What if it's just a matter of it simply not being plugged in? Don't you even go look?"

"No. Note in the ticket that customer needs to contact the vendor and close it out."

SERIOUSLY, BITCH?

(As it turned out, I did go check it out and it was simply unplugged.)

Well, I don't fantasize about an airplane crashing into the building before arriving at work like I used to do at DISH, so that's something, right?

It's only 7:30 am and I already have the headache that usually hits around 2 pm.

With all the years I've been doing PC support, one truth is self-evident: every company has approximately a dozen users who are unmitigated pains-in-the-ass. It's either because they're willfully ignorant, refuse to learn and expect you to hold their hand through every step of a process—or they're arrogant assholes who they think the entire organization will collapse if they can't do their work. Usually the two go hand-in-hand.

Yesterday I had a very unpleasant interaction with one of these Dirty Dozen. Afterward I mentioned this user's name to one of my coworkers, and he responded, "Oh, you mean 'Queen-Of-All-She-Surveys?'" Glad to know it isn't just me who has this opinion.

I have a bit of history with this person. Several months ago I was assigned a ticket to help her recover some pictures from a CD. I didn't think anything of it until I actually got deskside and found out that they were personal photos from her daughter's birthday party.

I told her I would be unable to assist because this was not work related. She lit into me about not providing good customer service and how the entire support structure here was crap and she was going to speak to my supervisor…yada, yada, yada.

It was all I could do to not roll my eyes.

Well, after I got back to my desk I immediately called my boss who backed me 100%. "That was definitely not work related and she shouldn't have called it in. You did the right thing."

Well about a week ago I got a request from her admin to install a certain piece of software on five workstations in her department (including Queen-Of-All-She-Surveys). Thankfully QOASS was out of the office when I did the install. Unfortunately, I immediately ran into a snag because the software has to be registered online before it can even be used and it appeared that our firewall was blocking access to that particular website—as well as its alternate.

I let the admin know I would try connecting to the website with my Mac (which isn't on the corporate network) when i got back to my desk, and if successful would circle back around with her to get the necessary activation codes entered into the five machines.

I wasn't able to reach the website from my Mac either. I checked that night from home and it still wasn't reachable. This told me the manufacturer was having issues. I spoke with the admin the next day and told her I would keep checking over the next few days and when the site was back online I'd be in touch. "No problem," she said.

Well, yesterday morning I got a nasty email from the subject of this story asking why the software still hadn't been activated. "It's been over a week!" (Yeah, bitch, there was also a four-day weekend in there in case you hadn't noticed.) Before I contacted her, I attempted to reach the website through our network and lo and behold, it was finally working.

I called her, connected to her machine, and activated the software. The software of course, required additional user-specific setup to be done before it could be used, and when I told her it would be a few more minutes, she snapped, "I don't have time for this! We ordered this software weeks ago and it should work without having to go through all this!" At this point I had to bite my tongue. I very calmly asked, "When do you have time available to finish setting up the software?"

"I don't know! You have control of my PC and I need to look at my calendar!"

I told her to take the mouse, open Outlook and check.

"1 pm. It's the only time I have available."

"Great," I said. "I'll send you an Outlook invite for 1 pm today."

I called her at 1 pm. "I don't need your help any more. My admin set it up for me."

What. A. Cunt.

When I came on board at this agency eighteen months ago as a contracted "imaging specialist," they were hip deep in a statewide PC refresh project that was not going well. (I had interviewed with them two prior times during the previous six months to assist with this project, first as a "morning after" service desk technician and then as a PC tech. I was rejected both times—and at that point they were already nearly a year behind schedule.)

Initially the new equipment was being pushed out with Windows 10. It was resoundingly hated by the user base, but more importantly it didn't play nice with several mission-critical software applications. (You'd think they would've done some testing first, but no—this is the gub'mint after all.)

About three months into my tenure, the grousing from the users and the software incompatibilities became such an issue that it was announced that we were no longer to be rolling out Windows 10, and were reverting to 7 from that point forward. The machines that were already in the field with 10 were going to remain unless they needed to run that incompatible software (or the users screamed loud enough).

Prior to this gig, I had next-to-no experience with 10, and after fighting to get it to behave (as did all of my colleagues), I welcomed the news that everything was going back to 7.

But then something funny happened. As my contract was starting to wind down, I decided to load 10 on my own workstation. All the job postings I looked at required at least a modicum of Windows 10 experience, so I figured I'd better grab what I could while I had the opportunity.

And it turned out I actually came to like the OS—not enough for me to ever want to give up Apple for my own personal computing, but in a work environment it really wasn't bad!

The main part of the refresh project ended last fall, but instead of packing my things and saying goodbye as I'd anticipated, they offered to keep me on as a pc/desktop tech (with a 30% increase in pay). Naturally I accepted, so I didn't need the Windows 10 experience, but I'm still glad to have gained it.

We just completed Phase 2 of the statewide refresh, and Windows 7 is still being put out there. Surprisingly, there's been no talk of revisiting Windows 10, even though Microsoft's support of 7 will be ending in about 30 months—only halfway through the agency's 5-year hardware refresh schedule. I find that more than a little short-sighted, especially since as far as I know, nothing is being done to get the non-compliant applications brought up to speed.

I guess if nothing else it's job security for me…

That's how I describe my current place of employment.

Prior to this gig, I had never worked for a government agency. Needless to say, the past eighteen months have been an eye-opener, and what stands out the most is the sheer number of societal outcasts and broken people—both mentally and physically—working here. And before anyone says, "But you work there too!" I readily admit that being here obviously puts me in that class as well. But is it societal, mental or physical? As Ben says, it's probably "Some o' Column A, some o' Column B."

That's not to say any these folks are unpleasant. They aren't. But they do tend to fall into two broad categories: those who don't give a fuck yet somehow manage to retain their jobs, and those who are absolutely anal about dotting every "i" and crossing every "t".

The two colleagues with whom I share office space and work closely—both of whom have been here forever—each come from one of those groups. One disappears for hours on end; no one seems to know where he goes, but our customers have noted he spends an awful lot of time in the parking lot on his phone. He does close his assignments, so I assume he's doing something job related during his vanishing acts.

My other co-worker has a hissy if I fail to move my magnetic dot on our in/out board to the proper column—even though there are only the three of us in this office and we can readily see each other from our desks. She has years' worth of file folders full of copies of all her completed assignments, equipment transfer forms, and department policies and procedures. If anything happens that's out of the scope of her daily routine you'd think aliens had landed.

The one common element between the two of them is that they both don't seem to have a clue about what constitutes good customer service; something that has left me shocked on more than one occasion. "We just install the software. Troubleshooting it is up to the customer," or "We don't handle [fill in the blank] hardware. They need to contact the vendor directly."

This flies in the face of a lifetime of trying to do my best work. Okay, I get that you don't handle [fill in the blank] hardware or troubleshoot software after install, but would it kill you to at least go look at the problem in case it is something that you can easily fix? Showing you at least made an effort leaves a much more positive impression than simply telling the customer in so many words to go fuck off because it's not your responsibility.

Despite the longevity of some of the workers here (one of my favorites is a guy who's worked here fifty-five years), there is also huge amount of turnover, and along with that comes a lot of knowledge lost.

Most recently (and what really prompted this post and illustrates the problem of lost knowledge) was a situation where I'd swapped out a customer's laptop. While not quite ready for official refresh, it was an older model that was being wonky to the point that troubleshooting it wasn't a good use of my resources. Her installed software list raised only one red flag—simply because I had heretofore no experience with it—but that one piece of software has become a thorn in my side.

The refresh went well. I even found the installer for this bit of software and everything was going smoothly. The problems started after I'd left and she attempted to use the software. The response I got from both my colleagues was, "We just install it. Roger (not his real name) in Applications Support configures it."

Well, trouble was, Roger had quit about two weeks earlier. His official replacement knew even less about the program than I did. To the guy's credit, he did attempt to get it working. Everything functioned normally on the new laptop under his profile, and the customer could log into any other machine in the department and have it work as well, but for some reason it refused to function with her login on the new laptop.

Since this particular customer is a private-office-with-a-door squeaky wheel who I sensed wouldn't have a second thought about getting my boss involved, in spite of what my colleagues had told me, I returned to do some basic troubleshooting to see if the problem could be resolved—going so far as to totally recreate her profile from scratch, thinking that whatever was borked would sort itself out on clean load.

Nope.

Roger's replacement stepped up and attempted further troubleshooting with the vendor, but after several days they both gave up, recommending reimaging or replacement the machine. Since reimaging would leave the customer without a way to work for 24-48 hours, I opted for replacing the entire laptop so she could work until time came to do the swap.

Well, I got the new laptop yesterday and loaded all her software except the one application in question. I took it over to her this morning so that Roger's replacement could install that once piece of software himself it to ensure it was done correctly.

But he didn't have the admin rights to do so. He also didn't even know where the installer was located!

Our software repository is a disaster. It's spread out in multiple folders across multiple servers, and even after 18 months on the job, I'm sure I still don't know all the hidey-holes where all this stuff is squirreled away. I went to the so called new "official" repository, but the version of the software I found there was ancient. I found a newer version at a different location, but as I was loading it, Roger's replacement said, "That's 6.2. We need 6.3."

"Do you know where I can find that?"

"No. [Coworker who lives on his phone in the parking lot] always installs it for us."

And with that, I turned to him and said, "We need to reschedule. [Coworker who lives on his phone in the parking lot] is on vacation until next week and I have no way of contacting him."

Needless to say, everyone was frustrated.

How can you be point-of-contact support for a software application and not even know where it's installed from?

HOW CAN YOU BE POINT-OF CONTACT SUPPORT FOR A SOFTWARE APPLICATION AND NOT EVEN KNOW WHERE IT'S INSTALLED FROM?!?!

Sorry for the lack of real posts lately. I just haven't been feeling inspired. Between the shit show that is DC and the return of my regularly scheduled 4 am insomnia (a time when I should probably haul myself out of bed and write instead of just tossing and turning until I finally fall asleep fifteen minutes before my alarm goes off), I just can't, y'know?

Add to that I was voluntold for a little project at work last week. On one hand it's a nice change from the day-to-day drudgery of my job, but it's forced me to work with two techs—while pleasant and easy to work with—simply do not possess the depth of knowledge or motivation I thought they did. You don't know how to highlight an entire line in Excel? Seriously?

We've been pulled off our regular duties to finish up the stragglers of the PC refresh project that was actually started more than a year before I started work here. I have assumed the de facto lead role on this because it seems I'm the only one who has the logical mindset and desire to do the paperwork involved in getting all this equipment rolled out before June 1st.

Initially we were told there were about 180 outstanding devices. That number dropped to about half that when it was clarified that we would only be doing the central locations—four sites in downtown Phoenix. The number dropped even further when I took it upon myself to look up all the PCs and laptops on the master list and determined that probably thirty percent or so had either already been refreshed (and never updated in inventory) or sent to surplus for recycling.

I understand why my supervisor selected me; she said she'd gotten so much positive feedback from the customers on the computers I've been rolling out by myself over the past six months I was a logical choice. (My site is totally finished.) But the other two? They're the secondary techs at the sites with the greatest number of unrefreshed machines.

About a week ago I was given notice that as of September 30th, my contract was finally coming to an end and it would be my absolute, absolute last day at my current place of employment. However, because I'd been told this so many times over the last eight months, I took it with a grain of salt and went on about my business, thinking, "Yeah, right." This past Monday morning however, I received email from my recruiter confirming that after speaking with my boss, my time here was indeed coming to an end.

Well fuck.

Yeah, I know I was making way less money than what I'd been prior to coming here and it was a constant reminder of how woefully under-employed I was, but for the most part—even with the multiple instances of stupid I have witnessed during my tenure—I have genuinely enjoyed working here and realized that I was going to miss my coworkers much more than I ever thought I would.

Even so, as much as the thought of having to go through a job search yet again (not to mention interviewing) left a pit in my stomach, I tried to remain positive. Firstly, since this was not a for-cause or a voluntary termination, securing Arizona Employment Benefits—as meager as they are—while I looked for work wouldn't be met with the kind of resistance I got from DISH after I left there. Secondly, I tried to keep the attitude that everything happens for a reason, and this was happening now because it was time for me to move onto a new chapter in my professional life.

Well, wouldn't you know as soon as I wrapped my head around that, accepted it, received a glowing Letter of Recommendation from my supervisor's boss, and actually started looking forward to having some time off, everything changed.

My boss walked in late yesterday afternoon with a very serious look on his face and his cell phone glued to his ear. I didn't know who he was talking to, but I overheard, "So this isn't FTE? Okay, I'll ask him how he feels about it."

Next thing I know we were sitting in his office and I was being offered a job; not as an "Imaging Specialist" (my current title), but as a proper Desktop Tech. It would still be a contract position, but unlike my current gig, this one was open-ended and could potentially last years. (There's a hiring freeze on right now for full-time employees; otherwise they'd offer to hire me outright.)

To be honest, my initial internal reaction—after seeing how things are done around here and dealing with some of the personalities I'd have to interact with on a daily basis as a Desktop Tech—was "Oh hell no!" But almost immediately I remembered this had also been my initial reaction to the offer of employment at Abrazo after contracting there those many years ago—and that resulted in some lifelong friendships being formed and the job itself ultimately becoming the one to which I compared all that followed.

I told my supervisor it sounded interesting, but frankly it would all come down to the money. I'd already applied at two other state agencies where I'd be making significantly more and he was aware of that, so he understood completely, saying that I'd have to discuss those specifics with his boss.

This morning when I arrived at work I sent an email off to the man holding the purse strings asking if we could meet sometime today. Not thirty seconds later my phone rang and the he said, "How about now?"

To sum up, after discussing everything and getting a ballpark salary estimate sometime later, I accepted the offer. My new title and pay grade takes effect Monday even though I'll still be reporting to the same location and doing the same tasks I have been until they figure out exactly what they're going to do with me. It still needs to be determined which facility I'll be based at and who I'll be paired with—requiring some personnel shuffling—but it looks like I'm set for the foreseeable future and I can finally exhale a bit…

I'm starting to believe that along with basic manners, civil discourse, and common courtesy, professionalism is going the way of the dinosaur in our society. I am amazed at the number of times over the past few years I have been praised for simply doing my job. Are companies really hiring such grossly unqualified and incompetent workers that the mere act of showing up on time, completing tasks that are assigned to you, and basically not being a dick to your fellow coworkers is now worthy of adulation?

Apparently so.

One of the things I have always prided myself on was the fact that my supervisors knew they could give me a task and it would be completed as requested without requiring their constant oversight. This managerial hands-off approach seems to work best for both parties, and probably stems from my many years as an architectural drafter. Once I was given a set of parameters, I was set loose to complete the task with a bare minimum of oversight thereafter.

Apparently this ability to work independently and actually do one's job without having to be micromanaged is a rare commodity in today's workforce.

First off, let me say that I am very grateful to have a job and to be working—even if it is for less money than I was earning ten fifteen years ago.

That being said, working for a government agency these past six months has been an eye opening experience. I have nothing in my work history to compare the level of dysfunction I encounter on a daily basis. Not even DISH was this broken, and that's saying a lot.

You would think that this agency would've learned from the fiasco that was their 3-month new equipment refresh project that was started before Ben and I returned to Phoenix and is just now—more than a year later—wrapping up. Hiring Dell to basically do everything short of placing the new equipment on users' desks wasn't their first mistake. That was failing to get the necessary teams in place to do proper testing of the hardware and software before pushing it out to the thousands of employees across the state. If that sort of infrastructure had been in place, then maybe—just maybe—it wouldn't have been necessary to terminate their contract when Dell failed to live up to the ridiculous expectations and timeline they'd been given…and then turn around and rehire them because it was obvious that without their outside knowledge and assistance the entire project was going to crash and burn in a spectacular fashion.

But no! Get it out, get it out, get it out! NOW NOW NOW.

So six weeks after I came on board and a few hundred Win10 machines had gone out the door, most of those machines started coming back in to be reimaged with Win7. Mission-critical software didn't work properly. Users hated the OS. The CIO "left to pursue other opportunities" and his replacement immediately announced that unless the hardware wouldn't support it or there was an overriding business reason for Win10 to be used, all new hardware that went out was to be loaded with Win7.

I can't tell you how many problems that cleared up—not to mention it cut down our machine prep time by half.

My time here was supposed to have ended when the refresh project wrapped up, but I truly believe my supervisor wants to keep me around long enough to survive the agency's hiring freeze so he can bring me on as a full time employee. (This would be a huge pay increase, bringing me back in line with what I have been making prior to this.) Thankfully for both of us, a new project was coming online—the replacement of around 250 customer-facing kiosk devices across the state; all of which would need to be imaged and prepped for deployment.

And that is where today's rant comes in.

Once again we are being told to get something pushed out the door without adequate Q&A testing being performed—even though we know things are not working properly—because apparently it's more important to show that something is being done rather than wait and make sure what's being done is right.

With one batch of machines already out the door and in the field, the first time I had to unbox a few dozen other already-imaged machines was when the powers that be realized the assigned computer names were too long and couldn't properly join the domain. The second time the machines (which thankfully hadn't gone out yet) were unboxed was because someone realized that from a data security perspective, these very public machines probably shouldn't have their USB ports active. The third time they were unboxed was because someone else realized that the machines needed to have an auto-login to the service account that ran the kiosk software.

The auto-logon worked sporadically at best, and seemed to be tied to the machines being in the proper group in Active Directory. Once they were in the correct bucket in AD, some worked and some still didn't. "Oh, it's a back-end issue they're working on," my supervisor said. "Go ahead and box them up and get them ready to go out."

Against my better judgment, I boxed them up again. My boss returned to the workroom shortly after I'd finished the chore and said, "We need to force group policy again."

I wonder what stupidity tomorrow will bring?

This past weekend Ben and I were discussing my impending return to unemployment, and I said, "I wouldn't be surprised if Tony (my supervisor) pulled some kind of Hail Mary Pass to keep me around."

Indeed, a Hail Mary Pass was thrown on Monday. "Would you be interested in staying around a little longer—through the end of August—to help Paul retrieve old equipment from out in the field? You guys could go out in the morning while it's still cool and then do your regular duties in the afternoon."

Hell yes, I would—especially considering recruiters weren't exactly knocking down my door and Ben and I been wondering how our little household would survive on me bringing home the measly $240/week (less than minimum wage!) that AZ unemployment would provide while looking for other work.

This offer was not extended to the other contractor who came on the same time I did, and while everyone concerned has done their level best to keep him blissfully unaware of this eleventh-hour development, the fact he didn't show up for work today or notify anyone that he wouldn't be coming in (ostensibly our last day here) tells me he might've found out…

My supervisor came in this morning and said, "Bad news. July 22nd."

I knew what he was talking about even before the conversation continued. After six months, my contract at my current place of employment is finally coming to an end. We both knew this was coming, so it wasn't a complete surprise. We both just thought—hoped—it would end up going a bit longer. The project iself has been a clusterfuck since long before I came on board, and it seemed that every day the scope and direction was changing, but we rolled with the punches and managed to meet all the deadlines. My initial contract was supposed to be for 90 days, but I've now been here six months, and in spite of upper management's best efforts, the project is wrapping up.

On one hand, I'm disappointed because both my boss and I were hoping that he'd be able to keep me around at least through the end of September— or long enough for a permanent opening to come available in the department because I genuinely like it here. On the other hand, it's been a struggle for me to get by on the amount of money I've been earning (less than I was making fifteen years ago), something that going perm would definitely take care of.

So yeah.

After our chat, I let my recruiter know what was going on. He said he was working on a position in a different department at the organization. (This is the same department I interviewed with twice last fall and was summarily rejected by both times. The difference now is that I have a glowing internal recommendation behind me, so perhaps this will turn into something good after all.)

In any case, I'm overdue for landing in a job where I end up staying for more than a couple years (or, as it seems since our return to Phoenix, a couple months). At this point, if I could find an Abrazo or an H&M (two places I worked for nearly a decade each), I could conceivably retire from the place…

And believe me, next to pissing off Payroll, pissing off I.T. is the dumbest thing you can do at work. Trust me. We can make your life a living hell.

1. Be Prepared.
One of the things that i was always taught as a kid was to be prepared. This includes being prepared when you call support. There is always a couple of routine questions that are asked,

What workstation are you using?
What printer is having issues?

Nothing pisses of support quicker than waiting around while you try to find information that you knew you would need.

2. Don't be belligerent.
We don't try to be rude, but 9 times out of 10 we have a dozen other things going, at least 6 of which are more important than your icons moving around. If we get short, it's because you are wasting our time, or we have something better to do.

3. Understand that we are busy.
Unless you sign the paycheck, we will not drop whatever we are doing to make your Pandora radio play. We will get to it as soon as possible.

4. Don't submit a ticket, email to make sure we got it, and then call to make sure we saw your email.
The system works, trust us. If it doesn't we will let you know.

5. Don't try to tell us how to answer your own question.
If you know better than we do then why did you bother asking?
If we don't know the answer we will tell you.

6. If you have a problem tell us.
It is really tough, borderline impossible, to fix issues that we don't know about.

Don't bitch about it behind our backs. W don't like hearing about things through the grapevine.

7. Answer any questions that are asked.
When we respond to your ticket with a question, it's because we need to know more to help you, not because we like playing 20 questions. It's also likely that you missed #1 above. And, if you ignore us, we can't help you

Responding with "I just want it to work" * cough* CEOs * cough* is not going to help.

8. Don't ambush us.
Just because we are walking by doesn't mean we're twiddling our thumbs, looking for something to do—more often than not, we're on our way to do something. In fact, we usually will forget what you tell us fixing whatever we're on our way to work on…

9. Don't lie to us.
We'll find out that you dumped your entire cup of coffee in your keyboard one way or another. Just tell us everything up front. It will save both of us a lot of time.

10. For managers: Don't micro-manage.
Chances are we know what we are doing better than you do. It will be documented next time we have a second, and though it may not make sense you, it will make sense to another technical individual.