h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is it too much to ask that there is the miniscule possibility that you could wake up and steer me back on course? I'm fed up of not having the time to be able to deal with utter fools and their acts of gross incompetence in a fitting way.

Thanks a bundle.

D'you know, I was just about to contact you!

You've been very quiet this week - where you been ye little monkey!

Well if I were to say barely putting up with incompetent fools and their random targeted acts of ignorance, stupidity and gross negligence, I'd only be scratching the surface.

Here's the "highlights" of the top 3 "best?!?" moments:

Two computers at the area office underwent meltdown witin an hour of each other. The power supplys just gave up in a large cloud of smoke and noxious fumes. Not pleasant, and the people they belonged to weren't impressed that they lost their files and email in the process. Well we do tell them to back them up on a regular basis, if they can't be bothered to then that's their luck out.

A temporary glitch on one of the area office routers meant we had to switch it off for 30 minutes. As part of policy we inform the branches that were affected of the downtime (all the branches VPN into the area office so some would briefly lose their connection to area). One particular branch took the phonecall to mean that it was their router that was down, and proceeded to repeatedly power it on and off for 10 minutes. They then wondered why their router decided to expire, and then have the gall to blame both the equipment and area's IT staff (both of us) for their act of stupidity.

This one just beggars belief. We got delivery of the first of a new batch of PCs from National office for distribution to the other branches, in order to replace any PCs we're currently using that are over two years old. As part of the package they supply us with a ghost image of the OS preloaded with the necessary bespoke apps we use. All fine and nothing stressful about that you'd think, except for the fact that I find that they've shipped the ghost image preloaded with the Netsky worm! They've got serious problems with this, they've distributed a copy of the ghost image to EVERY area office in the UK, and if we've ordered 40 of the new PCs (which we have), and if the other 40 areas have purchased a similar number for all their offices you're talking over 1500 PCs that will contain confidential information unnecessarily infected with a computer virus! When we point this out to National IT, they have the gall to say it's not their problem. I don't know what to say, other than my boss and I have decided to cut National out of the loop in future and produce our own disk images for the PCs we use. If they don't care about keeping confidential information secure, who will?


See why I've had such a bad time? Of course it's not all bad, we've had a few new toys delivered to keep me and the boss happy (one of them in the shape of a new server )

Ta

Thankfully today's not been as bad, probably because some of the idiots realised they were

<vodka&vimto> poor thing.

*sigh* the things we have to endure on this pointless journey with a pre-destined outcome.