We're taking a bit of a breather while the world rearranges its underpants. Meanwhile, the other blog is here.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Shortcuts to happiness

All the new PCs that have been installed conform to the new corporate plan. You're not allowed access to the hard disk drive, only to a virtual desktop. The virtual desktop being on that PC only, not somewhere on the network so that you have the same desktop whichever PC you're logged onto (which would make sense given the the corporate machine tells us that we're all going to have to hot desk in order to save office space)(don't go there!). So when you log onto a PC you've not used before you have to:
  • set up your desktop shortcuts
  • set up your connections to the printer ('cos the systems administrator can't set the defaults on the PC up so that anyone who's logged on prints to the appropriate printer(s))
  • set up your email profile
  • set up your connections to the shared network folders
  • change the settings of your connections to the shared network folders because the IT Section's been moving the servers round again and the list of network addresses you've been using is now defunct
  • set up all the peripheral hardware on the PC ('cos the systems administrator can't set the defaults on this, either)
  • find out which, if any, of the networked drives the peripherals are allowed to save to on this PC
  • ring the IT helpdesk because your virtual desktop on this PC doesn't give you permission to access to the library management system
  • ring the IT helpdesk because your virtual desktop on this PC doesn't give you permission to log into the customer management system for the People's Network PCs
  • ring the IT helpdesk because there are shortcuts to the corporate personnel systems on your virtual desktop which you don't have permission to use but which are triggering "you have unused icons on your desktop" messages; only to find that they don't have permission to delete these shortcuts either
  • ring the IT helpdesk to get the same internet access permissions on this PC that you should have on all PCS
and repeat.

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