[If you've been following along, Dear Reader, you'll recall that RTI is a New Feature in these here pages -- short for "real-time interruption," this periodic feature will be some reality-based essay, rant or ramble. -- Ed.]
So, I'm hanging out at Kevin Whited's Reductio Ad Absurdum site, as I do fairly regularly (Kevin's got an ear for tunes and an eye for news), and I occasionally visit his journal there, thought voyeur that I am. Kevin recently (26 January 2001) wrote:
- I was psyched at 7 am (okay, as psyched as one can be that early) for a productive day at work, but that was thwarted by the fact that someone in the IT Department screwed with the logon scripts for about half the people in our office, and essentially disabled our ability to boot to the network (necessary for email, file sharing, and internet). This took over two hours to straighten out. The incompetence of that place amazes me sometimes....Of course, the IT people did manage to change the firewall to block any realaudio/windows media/chat access, because, heaven forbid, anyone have any pleasure while they are in the workplace. No, by gawd, we'll stamp out any pleasure at all. Work will be shitty, by gawd, say the powers that be. And so it is. And so are they, for that matter.
Why is this? The Band will postulate that there are a few reasons. First, techies are support people. And they hate to hear this, because they hate to think of themselves in these terms, because they much prefer to see themselves in (stereotypical geek) ubermensch terms. If you remember nothing else about techies, remember this: For the most part, they derive their sense of Power and Self-Worth from a Contrived Environment of Control. In other words, they much prefer to think of themselves as holding the reigns of The Great Society's ability to make any progress, or do any worthwhile work -- from communicating electronically to spitting out last month's revenue totals on an Excel worksheet. This Super-Hero self-image is much more palatable to Typical Ted Techie than, say, the one in which s/he realizes that, basically, they install operating systems and do soft/hard/ware upgrades. And they do this work primarily as needed or requested. And if they're really Living in TechnoLaLaland, they also get to mess with end-users (they refer to us as bottom-feeders, incidentally) by denying them "Admin" privileges and forcing them to rely on their services right down to specifying which network printer you'd like to print to. Which we'd all agree is certainly a very High-Level Decision. Uh-huh.
If you ever really want to see What Evil Lies in the Hearts of Men -- just grant them "Admin" privileges. It's like instant asshole mix, or something. Honest. Try it!
We ask again -- why is this?? Well, consider how our economy has evolved. Used to be industrial, now we're service-oriented. Who comprised the predominant labor force of the Industrial Age? -- Why, blue-collar males, of course! Unskilled labor requires brawn, not brains, and the industrial economy required unskilled laborers, not neurosurgeons, to grow. It really was a win-win situation at one point. That point is past. Now, we'd be silly, irresponsible and otherwise insulting if we were to imply that you don't need brains to be a good techie. This is not so. Nonetheless, many techies seems to exhibit a particularly virulent strain of old-time-Tammany-Hall-blue-collar-not-my-job-Union-ism which can easily be mistaken by Us Bottom-Feeders as any one of the following: Arrogance, insolence, laziness, cover-your-ass behavior, passive-agressive disorder, etc. You get the picture. In short, the people who comprise the lower levels of tech support in the modern-day work hierarchy are the Blue Collar Workers of the New Millenium. And with those collars comes a long, healthy tradition of Kiss-My-Ass Attitude.
So -- let's jump ahead here, and out of fairness to The Other Side, let's go ahead and ask The Hundred Thousand Dollar Question which, right at this very minute, is virtually burning a hole in the mouths of our Otherwise Incommunicative Techies: "Ok, smart-ass (that's me) -- you like to sit there and condemn me and what I do very minute -- up until you try to boot up on a Monday and you get the blue screen of death! -- whattayagonna do then, smart-ass?! huh?!?! huh??!?!!?" Why, I'd call tech support, of course -- if I was in the office.
What the Great Techie Gods-Among-Mortal-Men forget is this: If, however, I (or you) were at home, I'd prolly just curse and reinstall the OS. Uh, yeah guys -- we do that kind of thing.
How many people own their own home computers these days?? How many are PCs? How many times a day does Windows, Nestscape, Explorer and just about every other commonly used application need to be upgraded, and who does the upgrades? Does every one of us individual home PC users have a staff of technical experts who mantain our home boxes?? No. No. No. No. No.
Why not? Because, more often than not, almost *everything* comes down to "Click OK," the exception being setting up networking, or determining server resources, but those are *exceptions.* Upgrading to the latest browser is not rocket science.
So, if we don't have our own Tech Support staffs, who maintains all of these home boxes? Ummmm, we do. What's the difference between upgrading RealPlayer on a home machine and upgrading it on the office machine, assuming the office box is already running the app? Ummm, nothing. Who does it harm if the Errant Bottom-Feeder wants to load some dumb CPU intensive screensaver on their work box, slowing down all of their other critical apps?? Ummmm, the bottom feeder. Right! But, do you tell the Errant Screensaver Nut that their PC is sluggish because of the screensaver they think is so dandy?? No. Why not? Because that would require the Imparting of Information to the Uninformed -- which is strictly verboten for the committed control-freak techie. Why? Because to the control-freak psyche an educated user base translates into that much less of a need for their services. But don't call them "services," call it "support." But don't call it "support," call it control.
Back to Kevin:
- In contrast, my home network does not suffer from limitations imposed by idiots....Tonight, I put a network card in the computer...It popped onto my network beautifully, I tweaked a few things and updated some software, and it's good to go. And it sure as hell didn't take me two hours to get it all working!...
Not to brag, but I rather like the fact that whatever I do, I tend to do it competently. This is not an accident, and it's not because I'm any more "talented" than most. It's because I have personal and professional integrity. There is no reason to do things half-ass. There is no reason for IT people, for example, not to check their work to make sure the productivity of an entire office won't go to zero because of their screw ups....There's no reason for lots of nonsense. Yet it persists.
Do you remember it? That Y2K thing. The short-sightedness of 1st-generation techies coming home to roost. Do you remember it? Did your computer crash? Did the world end? Did you lose power? heat? Did your car not start? (See above, where we wrote: "No. No. No. No. No.) What was most funny about the whole thing was that -- as soon as 1999 waxed 2000 -- why, didn't all the air just leak right out of that little hype balloon?? A bunch of techies and consultants basically got left in the lurch, because, as so often happens on This Planet Called Earth, doomsayers are wrong, and their Nostradamus-like predictions are for naught.
Trouble is -- if we let them -- they'll try to pull off another stunt like this.
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