Friday, October 30, 2009

Slaves of Freedom

The council's decided to save money on equipment, furniture and office space by requiring all staff to hot-desk.

This isn't yet part of the operating realities of the Library Service, thank God! The IT Section has embraced the concept of hot-desking such that whenever you log onto a PC for the first time you have to:
  • Reset your password. Your password must be at least eight character long; must contain at least one number and/or "special character;" and cannot be similar to any of the last twenty-one passwords you have used in the past.
  • Create an Outlook profile for your email.
  • Wait for your new Outlook Inbox to populate.
  • Wait for your new Outlook Inbox to synchronise with I know not what.
  • Map all the network drives you need to have access to (assuming that you carry around a note of the addresses of all the appropriate servers).
  • Add any and all appropriate printers to both the PC and your profile.
  • Install your printer password and password permissions in the appropriate printer properties so that you'll be able to actually print some of the things that you send to the printer.
  • Get the Helpdesk to enable your Internet permissions on this PC.
  • Set up the shortcuts for anything that isn't Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer.
  • Set up the permissions to use any peripheral devices.

This council isn't big on productivity.

6 comments:

St Jude said...

I'm currently hot desking, some days I get to spend all of five seconds on a PC, just long enough to log on before I have to log off.

Pat said...

I assume it means sharing a desk? And you go out on strike when?

Major D'Omo said...

At least we now know where the BOFH served his apprenticeship. My sympathies, old chap.

Kevin Musgrove said...

St Jude: oh dear... My sympathies.

Pat: I don't think there'll be enough of us left to make any impact by striking.

Major: thank you old lad.

The Topiary Cow said...

OMG. yes that adds to productivity doesn't it. Setting up outlook every time? New passwords? Geeze, what's the point of being on a network if you have to do all that?

Dances With Books said...

Holy Jeebus on a popsicle stick. I thought the Glamorous Flyboys back at Backwater Rural Branch (BRB) U. were evil, but this takes the cake. So sorry.