To back up a bit … some weeks ago I relocated from a cubicle by the windows to a desk in a storage room, but really I was fine with the change, rolled with it, saw the silver lining in the relative peace and quiet, etc. The major sticking point was that the desk in the storage area was supposed to be configured like my old cubicle, meaning it would have two different computer towers connected to a single monitor/keyboard/mouse set up on a switchbox. One tower is for the unclassified stuff I work on most of the time, and the other tower is for the classified work I do less frequently yet still officially have responsibility for. The two towers run on two totally different networks. (I rush to point out that this two-tower set up is standard for the whole office, not some special exceptional configuration just for me because my job is vaguely technical.) From the time I got to the new desk, I found that the unclassified computer worked fine and had access to the entire unclassified network, but the classified machine couldn’t reach any resources – no e-mail, no databases, nada. So I brought this to the attention of the helpdesk.
I lost a few hours here and there when various I.T. people showed up, displaced me to sit at my desk, and tried unsuccessfully to troubleshoot my classified network problem. At a certain point I resigned myself to having to wait a long time for the issue to be resolved. But I wasn’t expecting the I.T. helpdesk to blithely mark my issue as “resolved” when that was in no way true. The weird thing was the recent sequence of events. Last Friday an I.T. guy asked me to check my classified connection when I had a chance, because he thought they had finally fixed the problem. He wandered off, I got around to checking later, I found that nothing had changed and I still had no connectivity, and I experienced a complete and total lack of shock at this. I was so non-shocked that I left work for the weekend without taking any further action, but on Monday morning I remembered again so I checked the network connections for my classified tower one more time, found they were still dead, and e-mailed the guy who had stopped by on Friday. A couple of hours later, I got the “ok, all fixed, kthxbye” form e-mail from the I.T. helpdesk system and I was somewhat torqued by it, especially once I checked the connections one more time, which put the lie to the e-mail.
So what I should have done was taken that torque and put it to use composing a scathing e-mail asking what kind of system allowed the helpdesk staff to just arbitrarily mark a problem as “resolved” when not a blessed thing had changed. At the very least I should have put in a new request to open a new ticket and indicated (fairly passive aggressively?) that it was still the same problem I had been having before. But I just couldn’t work up the energy. My classified connectivity issue had been malingering for so long that I figured it could just as well wait a few more days. Maybe I’d be really bored later in the week. (Moreso than usual.) So yesterday, I did nothing.
Then today the I.T. guy from Friday stopped by again with what I took to be an unjustifiably optimistic “Try it now!” Yet amazingly, when I tried today, I had all the classified network connections I am supposed to have. So overnight between Monday and Tuesday it got magically fixed. And I was spared the regret and remorse of having excoriated the helpdesk for prematurely marking the issue as resolved in their tracking system. And all of that is pretty good stuff, on balance, except when I cock my head and look at it and realize that in order to get to that point I had to be utterly beaten down and adopt the belief system that things around here, including the vital services I truly need to actually be technically able to do my job, will only get fixed on geologically long timescales, if ever. And adopt that belief system I have. It's ugly, but it is serving me well.
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