Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Again from John Gruber’s linked list, here’s a Craigslist post from someone who seems to be an IT lackey in Boston. I can’t decide whether this post is serious, exaggerated to make a point, or straight-up mockery. In any case, I wanted to go through each of the 12 points to illustrate my IT style versus the style of aforementioned article.

1.They are all my computers; I am only letting you borrow them. People constantly laugh at me when I say this, with no idea that I am absolutely serious. I have been given the responsibility of every computer in the office; they are all under my auspices, bar none. if I am gracious enough to give you access to one of my computers, then be nice to it. Talk to it kindly, call it a nice computer, and occasionally pat the monitor. Your computer – and your IT guy – will thank you for it. Also, this applies to printers, the network connection to the outside world, the videoconference system, and the phone system. Mine. All mine. Get it? Good.

They are all the company’s computers. The company has purchased them for employee use, and the company has hired me to make sure these devices work correctly for you. I do ask that you be nice to the computers because it’s a benefit to us both - your work isn’t interrupted and I’m able to spend my time improving infrastructure rather than putting out fires at every desk.

2. If you are going to use my stuff, then use it properly. This means LEARN ABOUT FUCKING SPYWARE. If you absolutely HAVE to go to some site during work hours (and we’ll talk about this in a minute), then make sure, when the popups start showing up, you click the little black X in the upper right hand corner. Don’t click the big flashing “OK” in the middle. Don’t. Whatever it is you think you should do – if it’s not that little grey X in the uppermost right corner, don’t do it. Don’t. Just. Fucking. Don’t.

Please use sense and think before you click. Sometimes you don’t know, and I understand that. If there’s any question, I like it when you ask me first. As I said before, working computers help both of us.

3. We know. Yeah, that’s right, we know. Every little site you’ve gone to. All the email that passes through your computers. All the instant message chats you have. We know. All of them. So the next time you decide you just HAVE to visit some idiotic website with a movie of two guys fucking a chicken, the next time you HAVE to spam emails to all your friends about the cute guy you hooked up with the other night and he gave you chlamydia, the next time you HAVE to talk to your ex-girlfriend about hooking up one more time behind your fiance’s back, think twice about who might be reading that shit, and if you’ve pissed your IT guys off. Because we know.

I don’t know. I have neither the time nor the inclination to keep up with the personal lives of any of my coworkers. I’d bet a dollar your life is at least as boring and meaningless to me as mine is to you. I don’t care, I’m not into voyeurism, so I don’t know.

4. Do not take advantage of us, or our toys. It’s awful nice of us to provide you with a boatload of network storage space for your own private use. Oh, and incidentally, that network storage space at work? IT’S FOR WORK PURPOSES. That means take the seventeen gigabytes of mp3s from some shitty hip-hop artist that you got from some peer-to-peer and GET THEM OFF MY FUCKING NETWORK. I won’t ask nicely again. And listen to some real music – hip-hop sucks.

Please use company resources responsibly. Disk space, for example, is a shared, finite quantity that the company provides with the understanding that it’ll be used for work-related data. You don’t want to be inconvenienced by an absence of free disk space on the NAS when you’re trying to do something really important, do you? Neither do I. So let’s cooperate and keep frivolous stuff off the network shares.

5. Learn to share. Look, I realize that the computer came with Windows XP. I don’t like it any more than you do. But really – that T1 we’ve got? It’s for everyone, so you can’t hog all our bandwidth by downloading the entire Fedora Core 3. Do it from home. If you want to bring it in to work and dual-boot your drive, I really don’t have a problem with it. But go back to kindergarden first and realize that hoarding is a bad thing, ok? Thanks.

Bandwidth is for everyone. This, too, is a shared, finite quantity. Consider the coworkers you interact with every day when using it.

6. The computer I let you use is for your use alone. This is somewhat malleable, where if someone at work needs your machine for a minute, you can let them use it. When your fourteen year old son comes to the office with you on Saturday and you let him use one of MY computers, then bitch to me about spyware, well, I’m just gonna tell you to lick the crack of my ass and spit in a cup. Sure, I’ll fix your machine, but after that you’re gonna have two icons on your desktop; “Go To Work” and “Go Home”, and “Go Home” won’t work until 5:30. Think I can’t do it? Try me.

The company-provided computer is intended for employee use only. Don’t let anyone who’s not an employee use it at any time. This is for the well-being of not only the computer, but the entire network and the company’s data. You want to still have a job next week, right? The equipment needs to work in order for that to happen, and our data also has to be available.

7. Are you a Program Manager? Then keep your fucking hands off of my fucking computers. This is non-negotiable. You people could fuck up a free lunch. Get the fuck away from them or I will stab you in the neck with a pencil.

My experience hasn’t been that program managers are a particularly inept kind of user.

8. Are you in sales? Please see #7. You people are worse than Program Managers. Drink bleach.

Same goes for sales.

9. Are you in Engineering? I realize that most of you have forgotten more about hardware than I will ever know. This doesn’t really give you the right to attempt to overclock the PC I’ve let you use to Ludicrious Speed. Please use discretion. Attempting to eke out a few hundred more hertz is fine; requisitioning a Freon Cooling Unit because 3.06G just isn’t fast enough is a little overkill. Trust me.

Please don’t fiddle with the computer’s innards. We have warranties and budgets to think about. If you cook your machine, there’s no guarantee the VP of whatever is going to approve the expense of buying you an equivalent replacement. Do you really want to roll that dice?

10. Oh, so you have a laptop of your own? Keep. It. Off. My. Network. If I catch an unknown machine anywhere on my net (please see #3), I will fuck that machine up so badly your high-school TI calculator will be a Beowulf Cluster compared to your new paperweight. Also, I don’t fix home computers. Tough shit. I hope you get herpes.

Please talk to me before connecting foreign devices to the network. The company buys laptops for some employees, and it would be damn naive of me to think that those employees don’t use these laptops on their own home networks (and who knows where else) for their own purposes. Consequently, we have some procedures and safeguards in place. Come talk to me and we’ll work something out.

11. If you want something from your IT Department, email is your friend. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but still – if you need something from me, email it to me. Don’t blindly call me, don’t magically materialize next to my desk and sit there while I’m working on something, waiting for me to pay attention to you – email it to me. I’m not doing shit for you until I have a paper trail originating from you about it. You can follow up with a phone call, that’s fine; you can come over and say, “I just shot you an email, can we discuss?” – that’s fine too. If you just come over and leer at me while I’m in the middle of something, I will ignore you, and mentally give you cancer with my mind.

Auditing procedures require that we have a paper trail. Executive edict has determined that we want to be ISO-something certified, or whatever, and to obtain and maintain that certification, we need to create records of things that happen. I don’t like it any more than you, so if it’s a problem, take it up the ladder. In the meantime, come to my desk or call me on the phone, that’s fine. But be sure to e-mail me afterward for the record.

12. Anti-virus software. Look, people, it’s there for a fucking reason. Don’t try to shut it off, please? Can we at least agree on that? We spent a lot of money on that software so that it would be up and running all the time, and it’s not really my fault if you have fifty applications open and “the anti-virus software is slowing my machine down!!” So I’ll make a deal with you; if you don’t shut my anti-virus software on my computers off, I won’t shove an abacus straight up your ass. Ok? Good.

Networks, and the devices attached to them, are a collective resource. Things you do with the network and devices directly affect others and their jobs. The last thing we need is malware of some kind causing a work stoppage because one person made a bad decision when they know better. Do not turn off protective software.

It’s possible to serve your coworkers as an IT professional while still setting reasonable rules, boundaries, and limitations. Admittedly, that’s easier to do when you work in a comparatively small organization like I do. I’ve read tales about bad IT people, and I’ve worked for some, but the people I’ve befriended and whose advice and recommendations I trust are not the blowhards from the horror stories. There are good IT people out there, and they’re not bad just because you won’t be able to use your iPhone when you show up for work July 2. It’s not that we’re lazy and we don’t care to prevent the problems we anticipate, it’s that we’re concerned about what happens to shared resources we all rely upon for our employment when a problem we can’t predict occurs.

I hate the idea of writing about anything even tangentially related to my job because I know people I work with read this page and I’m not usually willing to risk anything I say here being misinterpreted or held against me at a later date. Today, however, I want to draw upon my experience as an IT professional to comment about something posted on John Gruber’s linked list at Daring Fireball.

Question for anti-iPhone IT managers like those quoted in the Wall Street Journal story yesterday: Do you see your role as serving the employees of your company, or ruling over them?

(As an aside, I’m very turned off by how Gruber has divided people into antagonist “anti-iPhone IT managers” and “iPhone doubters” versus protagonist individuals who are implicitly more intelligent. “iPhone doubter” and similar phrases resemble “holocaust denier” and other pejoratives too much for my liking. He’s essentially accusing these people of stupidly “doubting” a reality of iPhone super success that is not yet certain.)

I’m not an anti-iPhone IT manager. I do see my role as serving employees, but not by obeying their every whim. I’ve been hired because of my expertise and to presumably use that expertise to create a work-ready environment. A huge part of my job is to make sure that equipment and services are as reliable and available as they can possibly be so that employees, who are generally technologically ignorant at all but the most shallow levels, can work and make money for the company, and hence, my salary. When either employees or executives dismiss my opinions and recommendations out of hand because they want something that may adversely affect others who rely on the same infrastructure for their jobs, that angers me. It defeats the point of my presence. It relegates me to “just do it because I said so” trained monkey status, and I’ll be damned if I’m anyone’s “do it” bitch. My job is to provide what the company needs to function, manage the infrastructure underlying that function, and protect the same. IT policy by executive edict or end-user whining snowballs into eventual disaster, for which I will take the hit later because of my inability to manage the arbitrary tuna net thrown over top of me.

So I intend to serve the employees the same way a parent serves a child - by knowing better in a lot of cases, and by saying “no” frequently when adverse consequences, including my inability to effectively and securely manage features-by-fiat, are likely to occur. If that means employees sometimes cannot play with their new toys on the corporate network, too bad. It’s not that I rule end users with contempt. I have to consider the big picture, and sometimes that means temporary inconvenience while the IT people plan and test and secure and make sure you have the reliable, functioning technology you need to do your job.

Utterly terrifying.

[Julie Amero] was substituting for an English class. She went to the restroom, and when she returned, students were gathered around a computer that was displaying porn pop-ups. Amero, who describes herself as a total computer novice, couldn’t make them stop, and she eventually ran to the teacher’s lounge to get help. In court, school officials admitted that the antivirus software installed on the PC was out of date, and antispyware programs were not installed. A school official did tell parents, however, that the school district had comprehensive filtering and firewall software in place at the time.

Although it’s hard to conjure up a simple explanation for why a substitute teacher would show middle-school students porn pop-ups on purpose, Amero was prosecuted on the ground that she had done this intentionally. She was eventually found guilty and faced the prospect of 40 years in jail because of the incident.

The idea that circumstances beyond my control could cost me the rest of my life in prison because of some superheated sexual paranoia that fuels illogically indignant parents and abusive prosecutors makes me want to surround my house with razor wire and land mines. Considering that in Ohio, you can be declared a sex offender without any criminal conviction whatsoever, I wonder if there is any truly safe place to live where children and their parents can’t potentially ruin your life at a whim.

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, Democrat, has declared that there will be no beer or wine sales during this year’s Ohio State Fair because it’s a “family” friendly event, and apparently by definition, alcohol is “family” un-friendly.

1. I have grown sick of the word “family” being used as a replacement for “children”, and the attempt to cast me as a second-class “anti-family” or “anti-children” citizen because I do not reproduce. Since when is the “family” some kind of moral absolute against which the worth, rights, and considerations of others is measured?
2. What kind of stick-up-the-ass society do we live in when a responsible adult enjoying a cold beer on a hot summer day is considered an open expression of hostility toward “families”?
3. Assuming reasonable adults still live in Ohio, why aren’t they mad as hell about increasing government contempt for their ability to conduct their own lives?
4. I would like those of you who routinely complain about the “Christian right” and their zeal for pressing their moral beliefs onto others to remember that such behavior is neither exclusive to Christians, nor the right.

I want to link to an article to reinforce some points I made in a previous article.

Teachers leaving profession in droves

Teachers stifled by bureaucracy and blocked from making decisions in their own classrooms are leaving teaching in droves, according to a new study by Cal State University’s Teacher Quality Institute.
…
In the Bay Area, the sky-high cost of living and comparatively low salaries also make it hard for new teachers to stick it out, particularly in rough conditions.

Sabrina Walasek loved teaching middle school science and math in Daly City and Felton, near Santa Cruz. But after six years, the Oakland resident found herself worn out from keeping kids in check .

“The amount of energy spent on discipline and behavior management just got to me after a while,” Walasek said.

The stress wasn’t worth the pay, she said.

“It was almost impossible to exist in the Bay Area on that salary,” Walasek said.

I don’t intend this post to make any judgments about the teachers, their situation, or their motives. But I did notice that the reasons many teachers seem to be leaving their jobs are the same reasons I left my job in education. Just an observation, but obviously I have a lot of lingering thoughts and feelings about that past situation.

Here was the real kicker in the article, at least for me:

The 1,900 teachers surveyed by the institute said they left mainly because of the endless amounts of paperwork, constant interruptions and fruitless meetings that take time away from actual instruction, said Ken Futernick, principal author of the study and director of K-12 Studies at the institute.

Welcome to just about every other job in America. In this respect, you’re not unusual.