Category: Work

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Training

The boss's boss (whom I not-so-affectionately refer to as Ephalba) has a lady boner for Professional Development and ongoing training. When she first came on board a year ago she made it quite clear that our department had been very lax in that regard and that things were going to change. So, within a matter of weeks, a new edict was handed down that we were to all sign up for training (of some kind) at least twice a year going forward to "grow our careers."

I think I let out an audible groan.  Bitch, I am 28 months from retirement.

The more I thought about it, however, the more I thought I could definitely use some improvement with my Adobe Photoshop skills, as well as learning Illustrator (I've always been fascinated by it but never had the time or—to be completely honest—the level of concentrated interest to actually sit down and learn it. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do both.

I presented my proposal, and while my immediate boss was all for it, the Wicked Witch shot it down. "These classes need to be job-related."

(a) You said any training, and (b) what about this whole "grow your careers" bullshit?

My boss argued that this was a skillset that could be used across the organization and—should I choose to move to a different department at some point—they would come in handy.

Ephalba was having none of it.

It's no wonder that before she took over the department I actually looked forward to going to work (albeit from home, but that's another story), and now I dread it.

So I looked through the offered Microsoft classes and thought, "What can I skate through and get that bitch off my back?"

And it screamed out at me: MD-100 Windows Client

Yeah, software I've been using since version 2.1 on a IBM XT clone running DOS.

While I"m sure she would've preferred I take something like Sharepoint or Powershell classes, she didn't balk at this. After all, I am Desktop Support.

The class (all online, thankfully) was two weeks ago. It lasted 5 days. And I hate to admit it, but I actually enjoyed myself. Did I learn anything I didn't know before? Actually yes—because while the class ostensibly was for Windows 10, most everything was done in the Windows 11 environment, of which I'm only just now becoming familiar, having loaded it on my work laptop a couple months ago. (Something by the way, I'm shocked as hell that main ITS hasn't chastised me for.)

The instructor was good. He was funny. He was engaging. And while a lot of what I learned couldn't be used—either because we aren't officially on Windows 11 yet, or because main ITS has our environment so locked down that all the cool stuff can't even be accessed—it was a worthwhile experience. And it kept me home for the entire week and suspended all my usual work tasks.

In fact, I enjoyed this instructor so much I signed up for his next online class, MD-101 Managing Modern Desktops, in December, which will be another week-long reprieve from my usual crap…and fulfill Ephalba's "two classes per year" requirement.

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A Work Week From Hell

Three more years. Just keep telling yourself it's only three more years until retirement.

You may have noticed that the blog has been relatively quiet this week.

On Monday (one of my two weekly work from home days) I was greeted by this email from my immediate supervisor:

Fellas, this week might be a bit challenging as I will be out of the office starting tomorrow for shoulder surgery and B. is out the whole week with some personal health and some significant primary residence issues.  It would be best if you guys could come into the office as much as possible this week so we have in office coverage.  I will ask L. to send out an email to staff about limited IT support this week but I'll let you guys coordinate what you can on in office coverage for what works best for you two.  Definitely going to need you both to step up a bit more this week while we are so limited on team resources and staff being out.

Mark, you will be in charge of all desktop support and coverage tasking C. where and when you need assistance for things you need help on (F. may be able to assist on some things as well, just communicate any needs clearly).  C. has a very full plate too with coverage on projects and application/system support (SharePoint SPO migration for August go live is a big one) F. can also provide support with communication and follow through on SPO and other things as they come up.  Just keep her posted on what you need help with. 

C. will be in charge this week and I have delegated control to him for while I will be out. FYI  please check in with C. for all supervisory matters while I'm out of the office, as he is the boss this week.

If anything major comes up or you have issues anywhere please keep L. in the loop and she will give guidance on how to proceed or handle.

We all have our professional crosses to bear, and B. has been mine—especially over the last few months.

Since May, he has taken a two week vacation (because apparently his adult daughter is incapable of driving across country by herself), returned to work for a week, followed by another two week vacation "building a deck" for said daughter in Florida, followed by one week back at work, and lastly followed by yet another week-long vacation spent on a cruise. Each of those vacations were augmented by a spur-of-the-moment extra day tacked on one or both ends of his official time off.

We're a small team, and when even one of us is gone, it affects all of us. But with B. being gone for these extended periods, and now, most recently gone cruising for a week followed by yet another week-long absence has left me stressed to the point where I know I will be getting sick—for realz—sometime within the next week. I know that simply because I know how my body deals with this kind of stress.

We normally have about 50 work-in-progress tickets on any given day, constantly churning as some are knocked out only to be replaced by new ones. Some are easy and some require more expertise than just any one of us on our own possesses.

This past week, the ticket count has been consistently hovering over 120, with fully half of those open or not even acknowledged because we simply do not have the manpower.

Even before the clusterfuck that B's serial vacations created, it was commonly acknowledged that we needed at least more more technician, but what did they do? They hired a fucking project manager (F. in the email from my boss) who doesn't have anything to do with the day-to-day operations of I.T. in our department.

Adding to the clusterfuck that was this past week, after a period of six months where we were unable to order any new equipment from Dell because of contract issues, everything was resolved and the backlog of requests were finally ordered and they started pouring in over the past three weeks. Everything's been sitting in our lab awaiting imaging and deployment because, again—we don't have the manpower to deal with any of it.

So midweek, someone in their infinite wisdom decided to call upon the talents of a not-official-but-knows-I.T. person working in another division in our department to help with the imaging of the equipment since I—who usually handle this task—was absolutely inundated with trouble tickets and break/fix requests.

Okay, the guy may know I.T. stuff, but he didn't know how we did things, so an entire day was spent—pulled away from the tasks that were already bearing down on me—to get him up to speed on how we got equipment ready to go out. Every task in the process was met with a question. And when he wasn't questioning why something was done in a particular manner, he was just constantly trying to engage me in pointless conversation.

LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE TO CONCENTRATE ON MY OWN WORK YOU CUNT!

"You don't look good in an orange jumpsuit…you don't look good in an orange jumpsuit…you don't look good in an orange jumpsuit…" became my mantra this week.

If all this weren't enough, it seemed that even the most basic of procedures—things that would normally take a few moments at most to accomplish—were taking hours because nothing was working.

I found myself uttering, "because of course it doesn't" or "because of course it does" more times than I care to mention.

Wednesday I came home and did something I haven't done for more than a decade. I sat on the sofa, chatted with Ben for a few minutes and then went upstairs and crashed. I slept until around 9:30 when I got up, came back downstairs, ate a bowl of cereal, and went back to bed for the night an hour later.

Both my boss and B. have been curiously silent in our group chat this week, and at this point I won't be the least bit surprised if we get another email on Monday telling us that he and B. are both going to be out for another week. I took my laptop home this afternoon and will be treating Monday as a WFH day—just like this past week—even if that dreaded email arrives.

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And The Drama Continues…

It's not much, but it's mine.

When I arrived at work last Tuesday, instead of going directly to our temporary area, I decided to walk past our usual work area to check up on what had been done with the cube reconfiguration. To my surprise, everything was put back together, and I discovered that my supervisor had already set up house in the cube that was in the general location of his previous one. I asked him if everything was working, and he said he wasn't sure, but he was on wireless so it didn't matter.

I told him I would go ahead and lay claim to the cube directly north of his (where we'd all previously decided I'd be moving to—in direct contradiction to where Ms. Elphaba Thorpe had placed me on the "agreed upon" seating chart.

I ran upstairs to get some ice water and when I came back down, Elphaba was standing in the middle of the space, lecturing my supervisor on how no one should be sitting in the area yet because Goodman's wasn't finished with the construction and blah, blah, blah. I looked at her and said I'd move when Goodman's showed up. As she rode off on her proverbial bicycle, she quipped, "Why not move now?"

I found a vacant cube (not the one she had intended to put us into) and set up shop. This was vacant, but had all the accoutrements already in place (a 32-inch monitor, docking station, keyboard, mouse, phone) so I plugged in there and got to work.

I did the same on Thursday, but for shits and grins right before I left that day, I swung by our reconfigured area one more time to see if anything had been done since Tuesday, and to my surprise a major reconfiguration had occurred in the interim.

When the original planning for our new space was being discussed, I had resolved to giving up my previous location completely because of the way the new layout had been designed, so imagine my surprise when I saw that instead of my old area being cut in half and designated as the work area for an as-yet-unnamed and unhired "temp" employee as it had been that previous Tuesday, it was now a full-sized cube that doubled my original "tucked behind the column" work area.

Needless to say, I claimed it as my own.

Elphaba sent out an email Friday while I was working from home telling everyone we were free to move back in Tuesday next week after the July 4th holiday.

I'm on vacation (praise the gods!) all. next. week, so not wanting to risk losing the claim to my old/new workspace, I went into the office this morning and moved all my stuff in. (This wasn't done in a vacuum; I'd told one of my colleagues of my plans yesterday and he said he had already moved his shit back in.)

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An Email from Elphaba Throppe

We've had a new middle manager for less than a year. She came from another division, where she had been working as a senior Desktop Tech. Why they hired her is beyond me, because she is so obviously in over her head it ceased being funny about two weeks after she assumed command.

Micro-managing is her modus operandi, and my immediate supervisor (he reports to her) has had to tell her to back off several times; that we are his team (she oversees two teams in our department) and it is not her job to direct our daily activities.

I started referring to her privately as Elphaba several months ago. [The name is more indicative of The Wizard of Oz than of Wicked, BTW.]

Since before the lockdown there were plans to expand and reorganize our work area. All of that got put on hold during the pandemic, but now that we're all back in the office (in my team's case, three days a week), apparently it's now time to do this. I'm not thrilled about the reconfiguration because I'm currently tucked away in a spot between a column and a window that overlooks the street below. It's cozy, it's quiet, I'm not immediately visible the minute you walk in the department, and the location allows me a degree of privacy to work without unnecessary interruption since we get a lot of walk-ups and drive-by users who—no matter how many times we tell them—are incapable of understanding the concept that we need a ticket from the Service Desk to do anything, thinking that if they pay a personal visit it will drive home how important their particular issue is.

Anyhow, we got an email from Elphaba early last week (names redacted to protect the innocent) that went something like this:

Hello IT Team,

I have an update on the schedule and the arrangements I have shared earlier in my email below on 6/2/22.

Goodmans are still scheduled to perform the work on Thursday June 23rd, however they will take longer than just a day and need to start the prep work a day earlier. So the new schedule for this work is from next Wednesday June 22nd till the following Monday June 27th. During that time, we only need 1 person from the IT team to be working in the office, at a temp cubicle outside of [Director]'s office, it is [Programmer who is no longer with the enterprise]'s old cubicle (her name plate is still on it).

On the day of the 21st:

We need to disconnect all devices within the IT area and pack all items in boxes and move them to the south west conference room by [Director]'s Office.

[Immediate supervisor] you can pack your stuff on the 17th before you go on vacation and put the boxes in my office if you like, or you can keep them in the vacant cubicle in your [Remote programmer]'s area  and we will move them with everything else to the south west conference room on the 21st.

[Colleague #1] since you telework on Tuesdays, you can pack on Friday the 17th as well, as Monday the 20th is a Holiday.

Mark and [Colleague #2], you are scheduled to work in the office and will pack your stuff before you leave for the day.

On the day of the 22nd:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

Mark is teleworking

[Colleague #1] and [Colleague #2] are scheduled to work in the office. I want to ask [Colleague #1] to telework on that day, and [Colleague #2] to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 23rd:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

[Colleague #2] and [Colleague #1] are teleworking

Mark is scheduled to work in the office to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day while Goodmans are working.

 On the day of the 24th:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

[Colleague #2] is teleworking

Mark and [Colleague #1] are scheduled to work in the office. I want to ask Mark to telework on that day, and [Colleague #1] to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 27th:

We have [Colleague #2] out of the office (on vacation)

[Immediate supervisor] and Mark are teleworking

[Colleague #1] is scheduled to work in the office to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 28th:

We need to bring everything back and unpack our stuff and reconnect all devices.

Mark and [Immediate supervisor] will be working in the office that day and will be moving everything back to the NEW IT area.

[Colleague #1] can connect his devices on the next day Wednesday the 29th.

[Colleague #2] can connect his devices after he is back from his vacation on Tuesday July 5th.

If any of the details provided above is changed I will update you. If you have any questions please let me know.

Because apparently we are incapable of orchestrating this incredibly difficult bit of logistics ourselves…

After I finished reading this, my initial reaction was to text my supervisor who was sitting about fifteen feet away—and based on his facial expression had also just read the email. My first impulse was to say, "I'm sure she had a wet spot on her seat when she finished writing that," but it would've been wildly inappropriate even for me (and I'm not known among my colleagues for mincing words). Instead, I just wrote, "Would it be unprofessional if I just responded, Whatever."?

He said that yes, yes it would be.

So instead I just responded to the email with, "Acknowledged."

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I Have Reached The Point In My Life…

…that if something doesn't hold my interest or fire my curiosity, it's just not saved in short or long term memory.

Case in point, my organization is rolling out new enterprise software called Tanium to replace Microsoft's aging but well-known SCCM. This was sprung on us about two months ago with a required day-long online training session that was lead by a guy who was as engaging as watching paint dry. After experiencing cascading technical issues with the lab portion of the training I said fuck it and logged off…yet still somehow got a passing grade and a silly certificate of completion.

Well, a couple weeks ago we got notice from the idiots spearheading this transition (Can we still use that word? I mean I'm not in Florida, so it should be okay, right?) that based on feedback from the first training there would be an additional mandatory in-depth day-long training that required a prerequisite two-hour long online training session before you'd be allowed to attend.

As much as I would've liked to skip the whole fucking thing, I was in no mood for the whining I'd hear from on high if I did that, so I blocked out two hours this morning to complete this prerequisite online training.

And this is where my no-interest-no-retention comes into play. First off, nothing about this new software is going to impact my day-to-day duties in any way, so I already had no reason to fully engage with this to begin with. High-level query and reporting on the state of our network or individual workstations is not something I—or in fact, anyone on my team—does. All that shit falls under the purview of main ITS. The only thing I can possibly imagine having to use this for (and again, the chances that I would actually do this) is for the biannual equipment inventory. And even then, that is a physical, touch-every-machine process so why my organization has chosen to implement this new system—and requiring that everyone from the tech gods to the tech grunts learn it is totally beyond me.

It took me three tries to pass the assessment at the end. Because I had no fucks to give. And to be perfectly honest, after the second try I gave up and cheated. The quiz did not provide immediate feedback for each question missed, but did provide the ability to go back and see the correct answers to the questions once you failed. I took screenshots of those, saved them, and when I took the quiz the final time, I referred to the screenshots and managed to pass.

And I am more convinced than ever that the only reason this piece of crap software was purchased is because the sales presentation involved copious amounts of cocaine and hookers in private hotel rooms.

I am SO ready to retire.

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Venting

WARNING: This is gonna be a long one. You might just wanna skip over and head to the next nekkid man.

It started out simply enough. I wanted to throw together a document at work that explains the new way one of our home-brew applications works. It's something I regularly do and add to our department OneNote binder.

I made an initial screenshot and was surprised that I wasn't offered the option of opening it in Paint 3D as was usually the case. I went to open the application directly and it wasn't there. I had just used it a few days ago, but now it was gone. Completely.

How the fuck does that happen?

Suspecting that someone in Main ITS had been fucking around with something, I checked with a colleague to see if he had it on his workstation. He reported that no, it was gone from his as well.

Okay, I thought. No big deal. I'll just go out to the Microsoft Store and download it again.

What. The. Fuck?

Now I knew that Main ITS had locked down the store tighter than a virgin asshole, forcing us to use our corporate ID to access the store and then only offering a small smattering of apps to download, but I'd never run into it being blocked completely.

Maybe it was something with my ID? I logged out of the machine and logged back in with my administrative ID. Same issue. The same ID I use to set up new machines and update the pre-installed Store apps that ITS put on the image.

I logged into a desktop machine I use for purely administrative tasks and saw that Paint 3D was missing there as well. I attempted to reach the store on that machine and it got me right in. This was getting really weird.

I immediately suspected this was related to the fact that I had Windows 11 on my laptop and my admin desktop was still on Windows 10.

I went ahead and submitted a ticket about the missing application and the fact that the store was blocked on my laptop—knowing full well the Help Desk would just turn around and throw them back in our queue. To their credit, they only threw the "store blocked" ticket back at us. I got a call from a guy asking about the Paint 3D and he told me he could make it available in SCCM/Software Center for a direct download.

Sure enough, about ten minutes later I checked and it was available to download.

And the download failed. Repeatedly. I even rebooted to make sure.

I believe it was failing because it was trying to open the Microsoft Store, and since I couldn't get there to begin with it wouldn't install.

My next thought was that something in my profile on the machine was causing all these issues; some obscure bit flipped the wrong way. Recreating my profile from scratch would solve the issue surely.

Don't call me Shirley.

I logged back into the machine with my admin profile, renamed my regular user profile folder with a .bak extension, and cleared out the reference to that profile in the registry (exporting it to a .reg file first…just in case I needed it later.)

Logged out, logged in with my regular user credentials and waited while the machine churned away creating the profile. It churned and it churned, and after about 5 minutes I left to use the bathroom. When I got back ten minutes later it had logged in. But the task bar at the bottom of the screen was completely blank. No start button, no application icons, no clock…nothing.

I rebooted and logged back in. Same thing happened.

I went through the entire process one more time. Same result. Searching the internet for "empty task bar windows 11" brought up several solutions, none of which worked in my particular case.

It was time go go nuclear.

Due to the amount of additional applications and customization I'd done to my laptop, the last thing I wanted to do was wipe the entire thing and start fresh. The hardware was also going on five years old, so it was beyond time for me to replace it with something newer and the only thing which had prevented me from doing so for the last several months was the amount of work needed to put everything back the way it was. But now I was forced.

It was already late in the afternoon, but I manager to get a much newer laptop imaged almost precisely at quitting time. I thought I'd join it to the domain, load the half dozen default applications that are not part of the base image, get my standard account logged in and VPN set up and leave the rest (that I could do remotely) for the next day, which was a scheduled WFH day.

It wouldn't let me join the domain. My admin account was now locked out because of too many failed login attempts.

WHAT. THE.  FUCK.

I called the Help Desk to have the account unlocked (because my colleagues had all left for the day) and was informed that "We can't unlock admin accounts. I'll open a ticket for Security & Identity Management."

I told him not to bother. I was just going to go home and let it reset itself overnight. I realized any thought of working from home the next day had been destroyed as I could not remotely do any of the remaining tasks necessary to get a functioning laptop.

I texted my boss and let him know what had happened and that I'd be coming into the office tomorrow (today)…but just long enough to get my laptop functioning again and then would finish out the day at home. He was fine with that.

As I texted Ben as I left work, "I have never had a more emotionally frustrating day at work than I had today."

Fortunately, by noon today I got everything up and restored on the new laptop and was back home shortly after lunch.

I also did not update this machine to Windows 11—nor do I plan to.

2025 cannot come quickly enough.