First, the restructure of our department. In the past year and a half that I have been at my job, I've see the IT Director moved down to Network Director, and then moved over to a made-up-position of "CTO" where he does R&D tasks. While that was happening, the CIO was moved over to Technical adviser to the CFO, and then to VP for Project Management, another made-up-position. This keeps these two on the payroll, doesn't cut them loose, and moves them out of the department. Meanwhile, the former IT Director's secretary moved to IT Director, and then added to Director of Educational Technology also, and now is CIO. The Dell guy I was hired on at the exact same time with moved from Helpdesk to Educational Technology, and is now my boss, the Helpdesk Manager. A linux network admin is now the IT Director interim, and everyone else has stayed the same.
Apparently the people in Facilities were right when they said "those who can't do, get promoted; those who can, work." I spent the last year and a quarter doing only what tickets I was assigned, and not taking on any extra tasks to give myself opportunity to be fired for screwing something up, or failing epically...but mainly because I was hired at my low rate to do the simple job of supporting users - not running servers and managing domains or working on LDAP and Linux Systems. As far as I'm concerned, they were willing to pay me my rate to replace toners and help users, and that's what I agreed to - the rest will cost them extra.
Well, here's the second thing...I spent this year so far asserting myself into a leadership role for the Active Directory migration project, since the original leadership and decision makers were not the ones actually having to do the work - thus missing a lot of the picture, and making blind decisions. By mid-February, I was leading it forward, and had us on target to finish early and effectively without interrupting daily workflows. Then in April, I was sent to the Law School to help them as I had become the resident "expert" for migrating computers. The Law School would have finished early too had the main campus side had their stuff together. But while I was there, I showed my supervisor just how much I knew about what was actually going on beyond my own desk, and took on a project that had taken 6 months of meetings yet no progress was being made.
So, my supervisor and I bounced some ideas, came up with a plan, and a fail-safe all within about 6 minutes, and went home to sleep on it. The next day we did it, no problems ensued, and everyone was happy and surprised. Then I had "opportunity" once they migrated the server (as I had made the plan according to the client-side responsibilities), and we encountered a problem. Having not touched the server or the software before, it took me about 45 minutes to learn the software, ask all the questions I had about how it communicated, and found the issue, and then fixed it. Meanwhile, they put in a support-ticket with the software vendor to see how fast they could come up with the answer, and it was going to take them talking to their team of engineers until the following Tuesday to come up with an answer, but they had a couple guesses. And then we had the same issue with another associated software tied to the server, but I didn't have the appropriate permissions on the network to fix it, but I knew what the problem/solution was.
Which brings up the third issue...I spend most of my day at my computer, chatting online. I get a ticket, and knock it out in under 15 minutes...often time right there over the phone, or via remote desktop. The rest of my day is spent listening to music, and programming for the-spot.net. I literally don't have anything to do most of the day..I'm grossly under-used...and my Law School supervisor expressed that to my boss. He was unaware, apparently, and there was talk of a promotion to a networking position as a jr. system admin, until I could show them just how much I knew (there was the phrase "promote to the point of incompetence" used). But when the restructure came around last week - no promotion for [[Neo]]. Nope....[[Neo]] gets to replace printer toners still.
Fourthly, it has to do with the "talk" that doesn't follow through. There was that talk of a promotion, just like there had been a year's-worth of talk about raises. And now our new boss is moving us to a different room in the building, to put the IT Helpdesk together in the same location. The incentive was new furniture, and the like. However, his boss told him, once presented with the choice of desk "That's a good desk, for you...now what about the technicians?" So because of the politics involved, and people not being forthcoming with information, there is dissension in the ranks of the Help Desk.
Mostly the dissension has to do with people complaining about their job - in particular the Help Desk phone answerer - the literal "level 1" support person. She answers the calls the come into the helpdesk - that's her job. She tries to help them if she can over the phone, but if not (because she's not as technically inclined as the Technicians, or she'd be one) she creates a ticket and passes it on to us. That's great - that's how it's supposed to work. But when she decided today that she was getting just too many calls, and stopped answering the phone altogether, it kept ringing back to our office. Normally we'll answer the phone because in the infrequent occassion that she's here and it does ring back, it's because she's busy. However today it was more than normal. So one of the technicians went to her office to see if she was there, and she was - she was just sitting there though, not answering the phone, just letting it ring back. So we stopped answering it.
Apparently she went up to our boss and talked to him for about 30 minutes, almost to tears, about how things aren't going right, and she doesn't think anyone understands how hard her job is, and that if it keeps up she's walking. Well, there are a couple things wrong with that - first, she's only here 2-3 days out of the week CONSTANTLY. We're placing bets as to how many days she'll be here each week - both of the helpdesk phone girls. (the newer one has picked up on this ability to just call-in because you stayed up too late the night before and didn't get enough sleep bullshit.) Second, she doesn't do her job efficiently - she does it, it's effective, but it's not efficient. Third, and the main point, if she doesn't do her job, WE have to do HER job plus OUR job too.
If we're going to have to answer the phones because "it's too many phone calls" then why is she even working here? We always answer the phone, and solve the problem over the phone, before we hang up. We don't even have to create a ticket for it and pass it to anyone, we solve it right then and there. And if another call comes in, it either rings over and someone else gets it (because there are three of us, and two of them), or it goes to voicemail. We are not near as concerned about actually answering the phone as she thinks we are. But she don't hear us complaining about how many tickets we have, and just stop doing them altogether. They're tickets - and they're phone calls. There is a queue for tickets, and there is a voicemail for phone calls. Everything will be handled in due time, and there is no reason to get stressed about any of it.
So my boss is going to take the phone calls all by himself for a day, and see just what the problem really is - if it's her, or if it's the volume of calls that she has to deal with. But he is probably going to have less difficulty than her, but a little more difficulty than the technicians might, due to skill sets.
Everyone has their job to do - when you can't do your job, everyone else has to pick up your slack. When you start doing jobs that aren't yours to begin with, and screw it up, you create addition work or rework. If you take on someone else's job for them, you have to do it right and effectively to keep things moving forward. I don't mind providing solutions and suggestions to the System Admin when he has to write scripts to call scripts to call scripts in order to do something that can be done in a Group Policy if there was just a little more thought given to it - that's what I do, think through all the different logical paths of a solution to find the most efficient and effective one. I think through the problem and identify just what the fears are and then find a failsafe for the solution that I have come up with to identify and solve the issue, and then do it. If it fails then there has been no set-back...if it works, we've moved forward.
I have found that I can only do something at the status-quo for so long, and then I get bored out of my mind, and either have to progress with my skillset or move on to something completely different. I've gotten to the point where I have learned a lot more about the code that makes the-spot.net work, but there is only so much I can do with that site before I'm actually done (for once) with the website. Then I have to move on.
BinaryAngel has been talking to me about a position at her job doing their IT work, because their currently employee is an international student and will be leaving soon. The problem with the job is that it's in Plano...just across the highway from Wizard's work. I can hope 2 trains and a bus and skateboard half a block into work to get there, but eventually I'll want to move up there. I'm about 80% ready to do that if I don't start seeing some kind of progress in pay+projects at my current location. I'm a Gemini - and I'm at that point in my life again where I get aggressively knowledgeable and start learning up everything around me, ready to break free from the stagnation that has gone on far too long by this point.
So something's about to change...
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