I get into work, and there’s no email or web access in my building. So, I call up my departmental tech support, as you do. Turns out the uni computing service have been ‘working on something’. I am not doing shorthand there; that is all the information I was given. I wandered out into the JMS/Pev2/Genome Damage quad to see if it was a wider problem. Nope the iPAQ hooked up immediately. Right, I know computing service have been fiddling, so I give them a ring. Three callbacks later, I find out ‘we’ve been working on something’. Great. At this point I am asked to organise a phonecall between departments. The guy won’t budge; as an end user, I am asked to get two IT support depts to liaise with one another because they have failed to do so. What a joke! I rang round, but was met with a clueless voices at the end of the line. Five and a half hours after they were meant to have finished (not that they told us they were working on anything, mind), they resolved the problem they created.
By means of contrast, today I screwed up a bunch of stuff on my website - the wordpress update (1.2) doesn’t like my .sql file. I emailed James at Neo-Technic to tell him I’d screwed up. I got an immediate clear response, and a follow-up when he’d resolved the issue that created the errors, offering to do the donkey work on my behalf.
I guess I can’t immediately blame the staff; it could be chronic lack of staff, or poor management, but I swear I have never come across such a wrong-headed approach to support since I’ve been at uni. If we didn’t have Dan, I think I’d give up.