Like Pulling Teeth
Mar. 3rd, 2011 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deaneThe product that I work on is supported on Linux, OS X and Windows so I have three different work computers, one for each platform. My Windows system is a laptop. That way when I travel I can still access all of the corporate services which our Windows-obsessed IT department have implemented in ways such that they cannot be accessed from Linux or OS X.
When I got it the laptop was just barely powerful enough to suit my needs and since then the IT department has added so much new crap (like Mozy backups, which I don't need at all on that system but am not allowed to turn off) that it now takes four hours to build the product from scratch, and there's only enough room on the disk for one version. This has made working on that system extremely painful and unproductive.
So back in October I asked for an upgrade. The new laptop just arrived on Tuesday. The five months in between have been a comedy of errors.
When I first requested the upgrade I submitted it as a request to 'refresh' my existing system. A couple of weeks went by without hearing anything from IT so I sent an inquiry and found out that they couldn't refresh my existing system because they had no record of it. I asked them what I should do about that. After another week of silence I tried again, was again told that they had no record of my machine and again asked what I should do about that. And again heard nothing back from them for a week or so. Third time around I was able to make some progress. It turned out that my laptop was one which we had leased from a large vendor, but the vendor had lost the paperwork. Since IT's database tracked leased systems by their lease number, that meant that my laptop (plus a few others, it turned out) had never made it into the database1. IT relented and entered it by hand.
More time passed with no further progress. I inquired again and found out that now they couldn't refresh the laptop because it wasn't my primary system. Basically, each employee gets one "primary" system, which comes out of general corporate expenses. Any additional systems must come out of the budgets of the individual departments. Only primary systems can be 'refreshed'. Additional systems must go through a different procedure requiring additional approvals.
Okie dokie. So I resubmitted my request as a purchase of an "additional system", which required something like five different people to approve it. It took about a month to get the first approval, which was from the purchasing manager. Not sure why it took that long. Next up was the approval from my manager. That took a month as well. I don't remember all the details, but it involved vacations and lost emails.
Then the automated purchasing system somehow lost my manager's approval. The first I found out about that was when the system informed me that my purchase request had been cancelled because it had been pending too long awaiting approval. Fortunately, I was able to restart the request from where it left off and wasn't forced to start over from scratch.
The remaining approvals happened pretty quickly but by this time we were into December and the person in charge of handling system acquisition had gone on vacation, leaving no one to fill in for her. This is particularly stupid considering that December is when the bulk of system refreshes occur. So she'd decided to take a vacation in the middle of her busiest time of the year2!
After she got back from vacation she wasn't able to get to my laptop before we were into the Christmas holidays and then New Year. Finally, in mid-January, the order was placed.
The laptop that I'd ordered had a six week lead time and the vendor took every minute of those six weeks before finally delivering it to our IT people in Montreal, where it sat in the queue for a week or so before being configured and then FedEx'ed to me.
The FedEx depot nearest me is in Sydney, about 110km from where I live. FedEx does not have an office in my area so they instead hire a contractor to handle deliveries and pickups here. The contractor picked up the laptop from the depot on Thursday, drove around with it for a few hours, then returned it to the depot saying that the address was incorrect. I called FedEx and confirmed that the address was in fact correct and gave them my phone number and detailed directions to pass on to the confused contractor. There then followed four days in which nothing happened. The contractor simply did not come back to pick up the package and the FedEx people - who by now were getting almost as frustrated as I - were at a loss as to just WTF was going on. They escalated the issue on their end and Tuesday morning I got a call from them saying that the contractor had the laptop and would be delivering it to my door within the hour.
It actually took two hours but the contractor did finally appear and gave me my laptop, with no apologies nor even any acknowledgement that anything was amiss. I called FedEx back to let them know the laptop had arrived and to insist that a big fucking black mark be placed in the contractor's record. They assured me that it was already there.
Five days to travel 110km. They could have hired someone to walk the laptop to me and it would have arrived sooner.
Of course, now that I have the system I've had two days of hell trying to get it set up. But that's for another post.
When I got it the laptop was just barely powerful enough to suit my needs and since then the IT department has added so much new crap (like Mozy backups, which I don't need at all on that system but am not allowed to turn off) that it now takes four hours to build the product from scratch, and there's only enough room on the disk for one version. This has made working on that system extremely painful and unproductive.
So back in October I asked for an upgrade. The new laptop just arrived on Tuesday. The five months in between have been a comedy of errors.
When I first requested the upgrade I submitted it as a request to 'refresh' my existing system. A couple of weeks went by without hearing anything from IT so I sent an inquiry and found out that they couldn't refresh my existing system because they had no record of it. I asked them what I should do about that. After another week of silence I tried again, was again told that they had no record of my machine and again asked what I should do about that. And again heard nothing back from them for a week or so. Third time around I was able to make some progress. It turned out that my laptop was one which we had leased from a large vendor, but the vendor had lost the paperwork. Since IT's database tracked leased systems by their lease number, that meant that my laptop (plus a few others, it turned out) had never made it into the database1. IT relented and entered it by hand.
More time passed with no further progress. I inquired again and found out that now they couldn't refresh the laptop because it wasn't my primary system. Basically, each employee gets one "primary" system, which comes out of general corporate expenses. Any additional systems must come out of the budgets of the individual departments. Only primary systems can be 'refreshed'. Additional systems must go through a different procedure requiring additional approvals.
Okie dokie. So I resubmitted my request as a purchase of an "additional system", which required something like five different people to approve it. It took about a month to get the first approval, which was from the purchasing manager. Not sure why it took that long. Next up was the approval from my manager. That took a month as well. I don't remember all the details, but it involved vacations and lost emails.
Then the automated purchasing system somehow lost my manager's approval. The first I found out about that was when the system informed me that my purchase request had been cancelled because it had been pending too long awaiting approval. Fortunately, I was able to restart the request from where it left off and wasn't forced to start over from scratch.
The remaining approvals happened pretty quickly but by this time we were into December and the person in charge of handling system acquisition had gone on vacation, leaving no one to fill in for her. This is particularly stupid considering that December is when the bulk of system refreshes occur. So she'd decided to take a vacation in the middle of her busiest time of the year2!
After she got back from vacation she wasn't able to get to my laptop before we were into the Christmas holidays and then New Year. Finally, in mid-January, the order was placed.
The laptop that I'd ordered had a six week lead time and the vendor took every minute of those six weeks before finally delivering it to our IT people in Montreal, where it sat in the queue for a week or so before being configured and then FedEx'ed to me.
The FedEx depot nearest me is in Sydney, about 110km from where I live. FedEx does not have an office in my area so they instead hire a contractor to handle deliveries and pickups here. The contractor picked up the laptop from the depot on Thursday, drove around with it for a few hours, then returned it to the depot saying that the address was incorrect. I called FedEx and confirmed that the address was in fact correct and gave them my phone number and detailed directions to pass on to the confused contractor. There then followed four days in which nothing happened. The contractor simply did not come back to pick up the package and the FedEx people - who by now were getting almost as frustrated as I - were at a loss as to just WTF was going on. They escalated the issue on their end and Tuesday morning I got a call from them saying that the contractor had the laptop and would be delivering it to my door within the hour.
It actually took two hours but the contractor did finally appear and gave me my laptop, with no apologies nor even any acknowledgement that anything was amiss. I called FedEx back to let them know the laptop had arrived and to insist that a big fucking black mark be placed in the contractor's record. They assured me that it was already there.
Five days to travel 110km. They could have hired someone to walk the laptop to me and it would have arrived sooner.
Of course, now that I have the system I've had two days of hell trying to get it set up. But that's for another post.
1 Rather than try to fix the paperwork the vendor decided to write off the orphaned systems and told us we should just keep them. Which just goes to show that all large companies are as whacked as ours, I suppose.
2 I realize that I'm being a tad judgemental. It could have been an unavoidable absence, such as for a family emergency. But then this is a rant and it is in the nature of rants to be absolutist and one-sided.
2 I realize that I'm being a tad judgemental. It could have been an unavoidable absence, such as for a family emergency. But then this is a rant and it is in the nature of rants to be absolutist and one-sided.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-04 11:21 am (UTC)Mind you, last time I did that, by the time I got the laptop, it was already 5 years out of date...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-05 09:09 pm (UTC)I was sufficiently desperate for a more powerful system that I told them to enter it into the database. It was only after that that I found out that the laptop didn't qualify for refresh because it wasn't my primary system, so I needn't have put it into the database after all. :-(
I really can't complain, though. The company only provides most of our developers with a single desktop system. I have two desktops and a laptop, totalling 24 cores - 48 if you include hyperthreading. Protein folding anyone?