Ah yes, the I.T department. I'd heard about I.T departments but never experienced the full brunt of being treated like the idiot end-user that I am. I had my laptop installed on my desk yesterday. When I say laptop, I mean Commodore 64. The nice laptop has been so disabled it's not worth being a laptop. There is no C: drive, it's mostly been hidden away. I can't download even the simple things like the Google toolbar, or a driver for my own mouse, the mouse I have is hurting my wrist.
There's a big exciting world out there on the Internet, and though we have access to the Internet, somehow the spirit is lost.
And better still, only a list of approved and validated software is allowed to be loaded. God help you if you find a bit of free software that makes your life easier, or even something as simple as MindJet's MindManager for drawing MindMaps, which I thought all of the world uses, but clearly not where I work. And apparently it would cost $10k to validate a new piece of software!! This may not be true, but that's what one person said.
I can understand some of this attitude. It's a bank, they have to be careful with their I.T etc etc, but so have many organisations, some of whom have a pragmatic approach to end-user desktop downloads. This is only my first day experience, but believe me it was a very frustrating one. Maybe it will get better?
I'm not a big fan of using the latest Microsoft software, but the most frustrating thing is all my Outlook tasks keep pinging up as separate windows, instead of a single list, and I can't edit my Outlook in Word because it won't save my settings, because it's trying to save to the I: drive instead of the C: so it keeps losing my settings each time I log off.
Grrrrrr. Normally with a new toy, especially the laptop I've been dreaming of for the last 2 years, I'd take it home, take it to bed, and play with it! I looked at my laptop this afternoon, sighed, and dumped it in my desk to have a sleep over the weekend. Thanks a lot I.T boys for making I.T about as exciting as my Ericsson T28s (see previous rants!)
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