Chapter 2 – A Classical Example of University “IT”
So before I write this obscene account of mafia-like management systems and government waste, I should say that inspite of all of this, about half of the people I and the characters in my story worked with here were really good, hard working people. The problem is with the other half. No organization can simply piss away 50% (or more!) of their money and expect not to have to make any changes, but that is what the State of Connecticut does. Sure, this example comes from a small University, but you will see how more than likely this is going on to some extent with many collegiate organizations nationwide, perhaps not to the same disgusting level, but certainly in a way that is helping to make college unaffordable to most. I highlight IT because when tuition goes up for no good reason, technology is almost always on the list of things that are blamed as a rising cost. On to the story which takes place at Central Connecticut State University in its User Support department. This incident took place a little over a year ago.
List of Characters – As Transformers to mask identity.
Sunstreaker – A part-time, no benefits, low-pay (but sadly, the highest paid no-rights tech in the department at $18 an hour), highly skilled employee who took the job for supplemental income while he pursued other interests on the side. He was hired for his general expertise, extensive experience, and certifications, but mostly to physically work on computers that often bear a fruit on their casings. In fact, this is what his contract states he was hired for and it also specifically states that he was to do this for the On-Site Support division of this department, but he liked to help out when he could by working on other machines that often “get sick” and bear a household part on their logos.
Bumblebee – Sunstreaker’s direct boss who actually assigned him work and went over his day-to-day duties. They became great friends both before and after the incident. Bumblebee was also punished for political reasons at one point by the department as will be described.
Skywarp – The On-Site support department’s overall supervisor. After Bumblebee was punished for nothing (aka also making a perfectly reasonable comment about how the call center should not simply reassign calls without notes for fruit computers), he asked both Sunstreaker and Bumblebee to report to him on call-center problems. He would later use this same action to accuse Sunstreaker of only talking to him about the call center and nothing else. Since this guy was not a very competant tech, and since Sunstreaker usually took his orders from Bumblebee, he was only doing what he was told to do, but Skywarp (true to character) is easily corrupted and often makes things up and twists the very fabric of reality for political gain.
Soundwave — The highest ranking union member who also happens to be the head of User Support Services. She likes constructing her own narratives, not gathering enough information, and using her control freak moves to force others, like Skywarp, to scream at good employees in dark rooms until they cave in to her made up garbage. She also likes just staring at employees to intimidate them. This seems to happen a lot more to men than women since her divorce, but of course HR and the department have no controls in place to monitor this behavior and lesser employees are afraid to report on it since they mysteriously disappear when they do.
Megatron – The current CIO. True to form, he changes his mind on whims, does not listen to his underlings, and has many unfair, unwritten policies. He does basically the same job as Soundwave, but spends most of his time walking around campus and ingorning advice. At least he’s nice to your face like any good politician.
Starscream – The employee who lodged the erroneous complaint. She likes flipping out in meetings and calling up On-Site techs and yelling at them. She excels at changing HEAT tickets to suit her purposes and is protected by Soundwave in her actions.
Blitzwing – The direct supervisor of Starscream. She often cuts people off mid-sentence, like Megatron, Soundwave, and Skywarp, and instead of taking their advice, she rants about how hard her cushy union job is and how people just don’t understand. She likes to punish people by suggesting that they come and work at the call center, even if they’re very experienced, so they can see “the horror.” She hates her job, but Blitzwing will not blame her department for anything. In fact, she belittles other departments at meetings by suggesting that the Call Center is the only really hard job in USS and that the others should be thankful that they are not doing it. Of course, Blitzwing spends little to no time in On-Site Support and believes that she has many personal friendships in the call center which may explain her bias.
Cliffhanger – The employee that witnessed Starscream personally attack Sunstreaker on several occasions. When this incident took place, he figured that it was all a misunderstanding and that if he simply explained the situation to Skywarp, all would be well. He was instead “let go” on flimsy pretenses a week after the incident for telling the truth. After pulling him in to a meeting and telling him essentially to mind his own business when it came to telling the truth in the Sunstreaker case, they simply said he was late a few times and had to go.
Okay, phew, long list of characters. So Sunstreaker worked for CCSU for about a year. He landed a job with USS with a one-sentence contract to work on fruity computers specifically in their On-Site Support section. This came with relatively low pay and no benefits, but he thought it worked with his schedule well. For about 9 months, things went pretty well and all were pleased with his performance, using his notes as examples to others of how their notes should look, and even giving him a raise after his evaluation period from $17 to $18 dollars an hour. He ran the OSX sections of trainings (the few legit ones that came up), trained other techs, and generally was a huge benefit to the department.
One day, he received a HEAT ticket with no notes in it. Now to those that don’t know what HEAT is, it is an excellent program that helps technicians track calls. In most environments, it is locked down to prevenet technicians from altering each other’s notes, but at CCSU, at least at the time of this incident, it was not. Even though CCSU spent thousands of your tax dollars to “train” a HEAT admin, employees can still change each others notes, but have those notes retain the original writer’s ownership. Sure, it will track the last overall change (aka group change), but not who made changes to each note, allowing the management to blame just about whoever they want when there is an issue and update calls to “look good” to protect their friends. Again, the system can be easily set up to prevent this. What I’ve highlighted here would be exactly the issue later. Starscream, under Soundwave and Blitzwing’s directions, would fill in the call like she should have in the first place to make it look like Sunstreaker’s notes were unfounded.
Anyway, since Sunstreaker had extensive experience working for a much better run call center in the past, he did what seemed right, since there were no written policies against it. He notated that there were no notes in the call, and that this led him to not really know what to do. He then contacted the user, received a co-worker, who said that the user was complaining that her computer was slow and that even though she had gone for the day he was authorized to turn the machine on so that Sunstreaker could look at it remotely he if wanted to. This would later be twisted by Soundwave and Skywarp into Sunstreaker violating an unwritten policy about working on the machine without talking to the user, which wasn’t true, as Sunstreaker would explain, but this information would be thrown out since it did not support the narrative that Soundwave was contructing. Since Soundwave only likes to use expensive programs like Bomgar to provide service, Sunstreaker didn’t have a license for this, but since there was an unwritten policy forbidding OSS to reassign calls to the call center, he used the built-in Windows Remote desktop feature. This did require a quick registry edit, which he changed back after completing the work, and since the actual State policy is that the State owns the machine, he didn’t think about the unwritten political policy that Soundwave has been giving to users which is that they personally own the machines and can do whatever they want with them. This belief flows from a misunderstanding of ownership and academic freedom. Anyway, there is also a free program called VNC, which can easily be secured for this kind of work as well, and the Apples have awesome remote tools built in as well, but when staff brings up these points at meetings, they are literally told to be quiet by Soundwave who hates hearing about open-source anything even though it does the same job and would save the taxpayers and students thousands of dollars. When Sunstreaker asked that these unwritten policies that conflicted with State policies be written down, he was told that he was being ridiculious. So basically, the management likes to change their mind whenever, and in mafia-like style, likes to enforce policies that they will not write down. You know, so they can do whatever they want and please whoever they want politically.
The actual call would deal with 4 computers in a lab, one of which simply had an unplugged keyboard. The other three had problems that could have been fixed remotely which the call center should have done. Starscream would claim that the user was being mean and that is why she didn’t work on the machines. This is exactly why notes need to be taken, even if a user is being nasty, but simply stating this would result in Skywarp (under the instruction of Soundwave) yelling at Sunstreaker in a dark room, and accusing him of “trying to run the call center,” simply for stating that notes were not taken.
Not even a full half hour later, he received a call from Starscream who started screaming at him over the phone. After trying to calmly explain himself, Starscream continued to scream at him, so he said, “I’m sorry, you’ve obviously become agitated. We’ll have to talk some other time. I’m hanging up the phone.” He then told his supervisor (Skywarp) what happened, expecting him to go to bat for him since he probably didn’t want his employees being screamed at, but Skywarp had been chewed out recently by Soundwave, so he instead told Sunstreaker never to reasssign a call to the call center. This is one of many policies he would refuse to write down. He never communicated this to the group, it eventually spread through the grapevine, but this was the first of many unwritten policies to come down the line. You see, as unfair as unwritten policies may be, corrupt bosses like Soundwave, Megatron, and Skywarp love them because they are unwilling to put into writing things that the State might actually review, but they want to be able to screw people over to keep others happy politicially.
Starscream would write a forced e-mail of apology which, at first, Sunstreaker would see as unnecessary but nice. He felt it was unnecessary because sometimes dumb things happen at work. He always maintained that the call center had a tough job and he knew so first hand. He did not respond to the e-mail because he felt that it was best just to let the matter go. This would later be used against him by Soundwave and Skywarp to say that he was a rude person that did not respond to such things. At this point I want to take account of how much time is wasted doing nothing productive from a technological standpoint, and how this incident, and the department in general, could have easily been run by one or two administrators instead of the four on staff. This staff is made up mostly of highly paid union employees. The CIO is the exception to the union rule, but it’s not like they make peanuts, regardless of what they might personally say about their pay.
About a month later, Sunstreaker would get in trouble for being late by a few minutes a couple of times even though his supervisors were up to half an hour late routinely. He never got in trouble for anything before the call, but now he would start getting in trouble for lots of little stuff post being screamed at by a union employee. You see, he gets migraine-level sinus headaches sometimes, he still was never late to any appointment with an actual client, as he explained to his boss who ignored him. Without medical benefits, it would have cost a lot to go to the docotor, and he figured that if it really became an issue, he could always go to HR about it, regardless of whether his boss cared or not. Still, with the union guys, it was a “do as I say, not as I do” scenario, and if you bend over enough maybe you’ll get a cushy union job like mine down the road…not because of your abilities, of course, but because we like you. Sunstreaker was late only once without a decent excuse and even with an excuse, not that often and not that late, certainly not as late as his boss often was, but since they can change the time clock data as well as the HEAT tickets, we’ll probably never know for sure.
Sunstreaker was then called in for forgetting to shave about a week later. He has sensitive skin, and in the winter time especially, shaving is very painful. He explained this medical condition and was again ignored by Skywarp. This was also further disgusting because it meant that this tax payer funded University group was actually going to hire and fire people based on how they looked, to some extent, yet they paid the non-union guys poorly. Many of the no-benefits techs made less than $10 an hour, and between food, rising tuition, and book costs should never have to make the decision between buying razors (so they’re treated like individuals at a State University) or buying food. Still, whatever, he painfully shaved more often. It was cheapter than getting a doctor’s note and he had decided to move out of state by this point anyway, so he only had to put up with their crap for a few more months.
Now let me stop and address the issue that many of you are thinking about, which is what does any of this have to do with IT ? Well that’s the point, this is a political organization that sometimes does IT work, not the team that you are all paying for in your tax dollars. You see, all of this stuff is going on in the background before anyone even considers doing any actual work. Not because they want to, but because people like Soundwave, Megatron, and Skywarp force these issues to be paramount in their department and make up policies on the fly. Many of these policies conflict with the spirit of an academic institution and State policies in general, but since they are not written down, and since the non-union guys have no protection…well you see the problem here.
Before I tell the tale of what Sunstreaker actually has to quit over lets look at the situation totally objectively. This is a small department. The CIO and Soundwave have basically the same job. They will say that it’s different, but the organization is so small that you really don’t need two heads of the department. Soundwave can oversee USS and another department instead of just USS, for example. In fact, you only need one overall head for all of the departments and then a few supervisors for day-to-day activities and no high level managers between the supervisors and CIO. You see, with the current structure for just one 20 to 30 member department, you have a CIO “at-the top”, Soundwave to “manage” USS, Blitzwing “to manage the Central call center” (about 8 people, 5 people if you count the part timers as 2 for one), Skywarp to manage On-Site Support (almost all part-timers a total of about 6 people if you count part-times as 2 for one).
Anyway, let me finish the story. The call center is not expected to take notes, this has been established many times by management, and is the only situation I’ve ever heard not only of this happening in, but being the norm. Even though this is their primary function, no one is supposed to ever bring it up when they don’t. This says to me that if that level of performance is expected, then the department might as well be eliminated and centralized somewhere else, or even outsourced. I mean really, a call center in India would do a better job of taking notes, so why pay for all of these union employees with expensive benefits if they aren’t going to even take notes? Training also becomes an issue with the union guys. If they don’t know something, they demand training, usually expensive training, because they supposedly don’t have the time at work. Which is, of course, bullshit. They are often caught watching sporting events on their LCD TV, or watching You Tube on their computers. They will not motivate themselves to train themselves, leaving all of the hard work to the part-timers who just can’t complain about having to train since they can be fired for any reason.
The management also likes to take expensive trips to hear about management philosophies. Of course, philosophies are like candy. There is one to suit every situation and therefore this is also bullshit since you simply pick the philisophy that suits your mood for the day. These trips, seminars, etc. cost thousands of dollars and sometimes require hotel accommodations. Sure, any business has these expenses, but when the State is spending what they are on your network infrastructure, there is almost no reason to send someone somewhere to listen to a questionable philosophy when they can just watch the stuff over the web.
On-site support followed suit when Skywarp couldn’t keep their number of unfinished calls (called open calls btw) down below 50 open calls consistently. They are often over 110. The logical solution here would be for him to do his job and assign calls to employees, but he usually only does that if a dean, or other politically high up figure needs help. Otherwise, he leaves this to the part-time (usually 18 – 22 year old) techs. He then demanded his own LCD TV to use as a monitor with a huge white background and red letters showing the number of open calls. That’s right, at the time, a $2,000 dollar TV was purchased to be used as a glorified monitor when the budget crisis had already been announced. No research went into its installation either, and when the workmen came down from East Hall to install the bracket for it, about 2 weeks late, they installed the wrong bracket which flush mounted it to the wall, making none of the rear ports accessible. Still, Skywarp was only concerned about whether they could play X-Box on it or not at their upcoming potluck dinner to celebrate the new TV. Luckily for him, some side ports were open for this.
Now I know what you’re saying. So what, so far only about 200 grand is being wasted in people and equipment. That’s nothing to the State. Well it’s probably something to the student who had their tuition go up yet again this year, or the old woman who finally lost her house because she couldn’t pay her property taxes, but lucky for you, I’m just getting started with waste. If we get this crap under control we could save tons of grandmas and grandpas from losing their homes to taxes and allow many more young adults to afford to go to college. Plus, we’ll have a more reliable, efficient IT infrastructure.
Now, of course, places need to do some team building…some, but not too much. You see, the things that are done in the name of team building here are kind of ridiculous. Many of these employees are salaried so they can always say that they were volunteering their time when a scandal comes up, but lets look at a few things that this department does throughout the year. Twice a year, they have a mandatory “team building” meeting. People that miss this meeting because they actually have work to do are often reprimanded for doing that work, but many want to miss the meeting so that they don’t get that feeling of wanting to kill themselves that the meeting leads to. The whole department gets together at these catered meeting, including the hourly employees, and they are all paid to be there. Sounds good right? Who wants to go and not get paid? But let’s get into what goes on there.
Usually, Soundwave makes a speech demotivating all of the other departments and saying how hard the call center’s jobs really are and how the other guys just don’t get it. Then they watch a management video for a few minutes, not the whole thing, just the parts that Soundwave is capable of understanding, which usually tells them to smile or gut FISH a certain way, and that if they don’t, they’re not worth having around. The philosophies are usually grown from small businesses, but of course, they must apply here? Plus, the management has to justify why they spent thousands of dollars going to seminars on this stuff. The CIO does not attend these meetings. Still, anyone with half a brain knows that the people that write management philosophies also make money selling books, running seminars, etc. Basically, you can find a management philosophy to back up anything you want because there is so much money in telling people that can’t think for themselves how to think. This costs the tax payers at lest 20K a year between meetings and videos, much less seminars which can cost even more. Sure, there are statistics to show how effective the seminars are, but statistics are made by the companies that sell the products and by departments that need to justify their jobs. It’s just like using Microsoft data to justify why you shouldn’t incorporate open source into your environment, which they do here, by the way.
Throughout the meeting, they draw stick figure pictures to express some words or feelings, you know, like you did in kindergarten and maybe first and second grade. They then show off a few things that may or may not be relevant, and then most of the salaried employees go home for the day after the meeting at about 2pm. Now let’s estimate about 80 employees attend this and average their pay at about $22 an hour, and figure that some are coming in on their days off to attend this, say, 4 hour meeting. This costs you somewhere between 7 and 8 thousand dollars twice a year, and that’s low balling it.
Now, roll in the pot-luck lunches and dinners that waste half of the day that happen once a month or more, and the seminars they go to where they learn how to think. Then add the one half day a year that they actually hold internal training that has to do with actual computer issues, like OS training. That’s right. They spend 7/8 of their time doing training that has nothing to do with IT and then spend the least amount of time actually training for IT. Soundwave usually shows up and leaves early if she’s not interested in the content or a section, setting a great example for the others, or asks very disruptive off-topic questions that make the training even less effective, and this 1/8 is the only legit training taking place all year other than some OJT. This is usually because Soundwave wants to go to the mall to attend fruit computer training, which is an excellent entry level user training, by the way, even though she has stated that she doens’t think fruit computers should be on campus at all to her fruit computer techs many times. She then often stays at the mall for the rest of the day after that. This is when she pulls the salary card. And where is the CIO throughout all of this?
The CIO walks around campus so much that employees have considered taping him and putting a counter on a website showing how much tax payer money was going to his walking around campus. You see the CIO effectively has little to no power, and decidely so. Again, he and Soundwave have basically the same job, and in a corporation, one of their jobs would be eliminated simply because the numbers are not there to support both positions. Neither of them make peanuts as you may have guessed. In such a small organization, the CIO is not that high up, but he’s an old guy that is just trying to make some money before retirement. In fact, since the time of this writing he has “moved on to other opportunities” so he was just using the job as a buffer anyway, on your dime of course. I wonder if this had anything to do with the at least 250,000 dollars that was wasted simply because Soundwave and the CIO couldn’t be bothered with really understanding proposals.
For example, 60,000 dollars were spent on a deployment solution that the University did not need. All of this after the state announced that it was in a budget crisis of more than 8 billion dollars and after Sunstreaker quit, Cliffhanger was let go, and another part-timer was fired outright. There were three reasons that this deployment was not needed. One, there was a free deployment solution that worked and just needed to be refined that was already in use on an X-Serve. Two, Microsoft provided a deployment solution as part of the obscenely expensive MS contract that the University pays every year since Soundwave shushes open source experts during meetings and simply will not pay any attention to them. Three, they never really got the 60 thousand dollar solution working and defaulted to the other two solutions eventually, saying basically, “Yeah, we spent the money on it, but we’re not going to force anyone to use it.” This after several blunders like totally erasing and reimaging a lab that they just didn’t set admin passwords for on the machines. This was all done with the advice of a union computer administrator and then the new solutions were implimented by a part timer who actually knew what he was doing when the union guys couldn’t be bothered with even simple security measures.
There is no surplus store at CCSU. Old working computers are donated to some extent, about 50 are kept as adjunct machines but most are not checked out and rot on the shelf, the rest are simply thrown away. You see, they’ll say that they have to do this because of the State’s policy on data. So they can’t sell you a machine with an old State hard disk drive in it, although your tax dollars bought the machines in the first place, the truth is that HDDs are inexpensive and they could simply sell most of the machines without them or hire some kid at about 9 bucks an hour to securely erase them and then resell them. Hell, they give out laptops that have sensitive, unencrypted information on them to professors all of the time. Of course, most of these users don’t need laptops, but want the convenience of not having to go to a well equiped faculty lab on your dime. They will also say that they need to replace machines on a 3 year cycle like most businesses, but one, the students usually have their own machines, two this is not supposed to be a business, and three the machines they’re throwing out still work fine. They often just need to be re-imaged.
As of the time of this writing, because of the budget crisis, the department has moved to a 4 year replacement cycle, but was on a 3 year repalcement cycle for many years. They gave users the most expensive laptops, especially if they were high up, and went through computers like water. It took a crisis to get them to even consider going to a wider interval of replacement. Sure, the warranties usually only last about 3 years, but most of the issues a computer develops, getting “slow,” for example, are easily solved by backing up the user’s data, and then erasing the machine and putting a clean operating system on it up through putting some RAM in and replacing a hard drive. You can also have the users run as standard users instead of admins. They should have never been on a replacement cycle of less than 4 years in the first place. This is not a corporation and the hundreds of working computers they donate, etc. are proof that they machines were still useable. This is partially the professors fault for demanding this accelerated cycle.
Long and short, things have gotten so bad that the non-computer departments have demanded admin rights and started assigning someone inside of their own departments to provide support. In larger institutions, this is done all of the time, here it is being done because of bureaucracy. Sure, some get admin rights because of political clout… Stop and think about this for a second, the departments are hiring their own technicians on top of the technicians that are already hired to take care of them because they’re not being taken care of.
Anyway, let me wrap this up. Eventually Sunstreaker had to quit. Starscream took the notes comment and ran with it. When Sunstreaker explained his concerns in a few professional e-mails he was told that this was the environment and if he didn’t like it, too bad. This was of course after being stared down by Soundwave for at least 2 minutes (in fact so long that he had to get up and go on a call because he actually had work to do). Soundwave would claim to HR that this was her way of going to “talk” to him. HR never talked to Sunstreaker. I Guess they can’t be bothered with non-union guys either. Skywarp, Soundwave, Blitzwing, and Starscream would unnecessarily spend 2 days in meetings amongst themselves and never get input from Sunstreaker that did not come filtered through Skywarp. Since Skywarp was yelling at Sunstreaker in a dark room at this point and Soundwave was staring at him to intimidate him, Sunstreaker did the only logical thing and went to the CIO (Soundwave’s boss) who had another unwritten policy. This policy was that if any underling went to him, he would immediately tell their supervisors before even talking to the underling, and then only talk to them with a supervisor present. Think about that for a second, if a supervisor does something serious, there is no one to go to. HR doesn’t get involved with these “low level” employees either. So with no where to turn….
So two things to note again. This was not the only time that this happened over at CCSU. They usually just don’t spend this much time on it. Sunstreaker was a good tech, so a bit more time was spent trying to get him to accept their lies and lose his dignity. The truth here is that at least three employees would be let go in the period of about a week. The department would start to cover its ass by sending OSS techs to the call center (for the first time in years other than when they punished Bumblebee for saying that “it’s not okay to simply reassign a call with no notes in it to OSS” in an e-mail) for “training.” In the past, before they got their extra full-time positions in the call center, on-site techs did cross train, but they hadn’t in years because the call center had more than enough man power now. Still, they wanted to make it seem like they didn’t use this as punishment to employees since the punishment they had in mind for Sunstreaker was to waste even more time spending a week at the call center so Blitzwing could show him how hard their job was. Again, he already knew. He had done it himself for another organization. Of course the OSS guys all actually had work to do, but getting the work done isn’t as important here as the political situation, and personal grudges.
This whole situation could have been avoided by the management not overreacting. They could have simply said, which was true, to Starscream, “Listen, there is no foul language in this, the rest is subjective, get back to work,” and all would have been well, but then they couldn’t justify the money they spent on their unnecessary management training or work towards getting rid of enough people to get their 3% raises during a budget crisis. The simplest solution is usually the most correct here. Soundwave and Starscream are buddies. They are both unprofessional, and the State was in a budget crisis anyway. Even if Sunsteaker didn’t do anything wrong, he was the highest paid part-time tech and Cliffhanger was paid well (in comparison with other students) too. By getting rid of them, they “saved” about 40K a year on employees which probably covered some of the 3% union raises. Keep in mind that the sate was in an 8 billion dollar deficit, so no one probably should have recieved a raise. Oh, and if you don’t like it, they’ll go on strike.
Still, what does this have to do with IT? Well the next time you are walking down a nice street in CT, and you see yet another home up for sale by the state to cover taxes, keep this story in mind. Keep in mind that the students are paying higher and higher tuitions, and that the taxes keep going up. Then remember that one of the big reasons used to justify these costs is “technology.” Then keep in mind that the highest paid individuals, at least in this department, don’t really “get” technology and to top it off there are too many of them. They have redefined their jobs to basically be, “I don’t have to know anything about computers, that’s what I hire other people for.” This not only leads to uninformed, wasteful decisions that lead to 5 grand in old servers rotting in an old cage, it also means that there are too many cooks in the kitchen and the techs can easily get wrapped up in a political struggle instead of getting their work done for simply saying something that does not violate any professional standard, but an unwritten policy of the department. Then think about the fact that your tax dollars paid for all of this and these non-technical union guys won’t even consider free, open-source solutions, at least in this department.
One other funny story I should include here before closing is one that almost definitely involved dirty power. There was a lab with too many computers in it that was losing power supplies left and right. The technician that took the computer in for service suggested having an electrical survey done of the room and was happy to talk to the electricians about what might have been going on, but was also happy to yield to their expertise. Soundwave then made up another policy, saying that it was “out of USS’s jurisdiction to talk to electricians” and put the responisibilty on the professor to do so who knew nothing abuout power, and the issues. This is of course not true, and 4 months later the electricians never really knew what to look for. It took them 3 to get out there in the first place. The computers were then repaired and then given back with this known issue in place simply because Soundwave felt like telling people not to communicate with each other for the benefit of the University. This is one of many examples of how people simply spend their time arguing instead of just doing the work and working together as a team. Can you think of any other modern business that has such stupid policies? The employees can’t talk to each other to solve simple problems?!
The really sad closing point here is that the University, like many others, has been hiring adjunct (no benefits) professors, many of which train excellent IT students who are actually enthuastic about computers and would love to have a union job with the obscenely good benefits that this corrupt management staff enjoys. So while the union guys are busy wasting your tax money on MacBook airs (because as they put it “Deans get what they want”) for Deans and other tenured professors, and screwing people over to get their “well-deserved” 3% raises during a budget crisis, there are legions of more enthuastic, more professional, people that can take these jobs. Now enter the union, who’s primary concern is keeping members that are paying dues whether they do their jobs or not. Then maybe we’ll get some people in there that actually are into computers and aren’t just politicians that deserve the pay and benefits that come with the job. Hell, maybe they won’t be scumbags either.
You see, when 3 of the heads of this department go to HR with something, it looks like a unified front, but when Soundwave is telling them what to do, it’s really only one voice. Oh, and you get to pay for all of this BS before any IT work gets done.