The Static Page

When the buck stops here.

I had a slightly unnerving experience yesterday morning at work. A co-worker's PC decided it didn't want to boot. Big deal? Call IT? Hah. I work for a small company: I am IT.

I did solve the problem. I think. The monitor the user had seemed to have taken a dislike to her video card. (No, I don't know why.) The solution was to exchange it with a somewhat better monitor from a server. Which has a very different video card. Both monitors are, of course, still working. *shrug* But it was a new experience for me. If the PC had had something more serious wrong with it - say a CPU that had died - I would have had to have found a way to get it fixed or replaced quickly. I haven't had to support users with that kind of turnaround before. I'm not sure it's really come home to me.

We've all got to be responsible for something in our work. It varies; I've seen glimpses of what some of you lot are responsible for and I wonder how we managed to meet up. Some of what is mentioned humbles me. Of course, responsibility is supposed to go hand-in-hand with authority. Trouble is, sometimes you don't get the authority. I've been there and it ain't comfortable. It leads to a lot of job-stress and we all know what that does.

Fortunately, I have some authority here, to go with the responsibility. I'm still not used to it.

Tell me about the surprises in what you are responsibile for. Do you have the authority to go with it? Or is someone up the chain busily shafting you? (And what are you going to do to fix it?)

Wade Bowmer, aka Static.

Comments? Email me at static dash page at yceran dot org.