Work Place Politics and Tattle Tales

Today should have been a good day. Over the course of the last three days we recovered a deleted web server directory with an 11 month old backup. However, we did find updates that are a little more current. Now we have a begun a process to fully examine the output from our backup system and ensure that we “inspect what we expect.”

So today should have been a good day, we are getting back on track and working to correct our deficiencies and nobody lost any limbs over the incident.

At 4PM one of my senior techs gets a call from the VPs office, there is an accusation being made that we have ignored a very important request to provide Internet/network connectivity and we need to “TURN THE FIREWALL OFF.”

Yes there are people in the technology they have absolutely no clue and cause much of the bad things you read in the newspaper. Another director had gone to VPs office and made some wide ranging/sweeping allegations about my staff, their competence and responsiveness. The location in question for this Internet/network access is the site of a state wide meeting tomorrow. They have invited a couple of vendors to demo their wares. So we had answered a question sent to us via email earlier this week. In fact I personally answered the email. The conference room has had wireless Internet, which is separate from our main network, since last year. We installed the connectivity to support a huge audit and accreditation team.

So my thoughts are that someone tried the wireless and couldn’t get connected. So I personally accompanied three technicians who had been demoralized by the comments from the VPs office. We get there and another technician from the Telecom side shows up at the same time asking “What the Hell is Going On???” We use our laptops and connect to the wireless network, no fuss no muss. So I called the originator of this issue and asked “What was her reason for calling the VP and making those statements, We are now testing the connections and everything is fine.” She replies, Oh I didn’t know there was wireless. I reminded her of my personal and direct conversation with ME! To that she Oh I’m sorry. I said to her “Sorry is unacceptable, If you had questions you should have had the decency and common courtesy of contacting me directly as opposed to questioning the competency of my team.” Further more I reminder her that “We are suppose to be a team.” She continued to say “I made a mistake and don’t know what else to say,” I simply hung up. One of my techs had gone down to VPs office and was there to see her beet red complexion as the director walked in to the office and start apologizing.

What the hell was that about, Was that a power struggle gone bad or just an incompetent ass being an incompetent ass trying to score some points.