Today Is: Mostly Administrative  

Emails of the morning: exceptions are made to the stated hardware requirements for the encryption of laptops despite the SOP documentation clearly stating the opposite (that's good for the unit I support); received new instructions on the procedure for adding email accounts to the large mail store (increase their storage on the regular mail store first then request the move to the mail store); three 'urgent' requests first thing from my support unit (can't access network drives [solved by a reboot - it's a laptop in a dock and likely asleep instead of off when being initially docked], miscellaneous unspecific 'freeze' and 'missing hard drive' (they were looking for the actual workstation and couldn't find it - someone had moved it, probably the housekeeping crew); email from an administrative employee asking about active-x notification in his email (unable to address it due to time constraints on his end - i.e. he's busy and solving the problem means looking at the messages which means him giving up his computer for a few minutes which he's not going to be able to do for the next month since he's under the wire for a number of time sensitive projects); client for my support unit stopped by my desk to ask about the Outlook outage (walked by to desk and ask client to login to Outlook - client had tried to check email earlier and it did not work but client had NOT checked it since before a meeting and did not know it was working - i.e. client stopped by my desk before going to their desk and trying email to see if it was working).

Up to this point this is the first 90 minutes of my day hereabouts. I have been fastidiously making tickets lately for even the most basic questions that my clients are asking since I am very interested in the exact number of items I am working on at any given moment. That is, in fact, what this journal is also about.

Around 10:35 AM the dead network adapter device from earlier in the week finally rears its ugly head again (as anticipated). At least I can call Dell now while it isn't working and ask for someone to come and replace the equipment. I have a hot swappable spare on hand, but it isn't full configured and I am working through that right now. As mentioned earlier in the week, I visit update.microsoft.com quite often and today is no exception. The hot swappable spare looks to be partially configured an I am running about 17 various updates. It makes me happy that I swapped out my old 10/100 Linksys switch the the new 10/100/1000 that my other location's NAS finally got wind of and killed off unceremoniously (which explains a lot about why I am spending more time in this location now - I need a lot of network ports and my other location has two ports and I have two workstations there already which makes for a problematic work environment). Hopefully in the next few minutes at least the Windows updates will be completed and I can cart this machine upstairs and get the client setup for minimum access for email and files. So, things turned technical around 10:35 AM it seems.

I took the spare upstairs with me along with a tool kit and the Dell contact information. I called Dell and they walked me through some steps. A step I did miss in my initial troubleshooting and updates was to update the BIOS. It actually might BE the BIOS simply because disabling and re-enabling the NIC in the BIOS reactivated it. Right now the device is working again and I have a Dell case number and email contact. If the network adapter dies again I can simply email the support technician and he will schedule equipment replacement.

With that I reach lunch time.

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After lunch the first thing I end up addressing is something I already have talked about earlier as well, which is a supposed virus going out via a listsrv from one of my support unit's computers. And again the level of misunderstanding is higher than the level of patience regarding the facts involved. Suffice to say that it is indeed a very technical issue, but only in the sense that it is a logical matter of explaining how things function as opposed to how the client thinks things function. A third part IT technician was pulled into the discussion and things get increasingly surreal from there, but suffice to say the third party IT technicians agrees with me. At this point I am not sure how to move this issue along any further since the feeling I get is that the client doesn't trust my judgement on it, so I may ask my supervisor for permission to have another technician in our own group to take a look at this just for confirmation.

Ultimately the client contacts me to explain her position, which I understand and we clear up the matter entirely. The misunderstanding led her to sending along an email that made it seem like a counter-argument to my own line of reasoning (i.e. it came across as "You're wrong." to me). Further discussion and being frank and honest about the situation clears up the matter entirely and ultimately we hear from our third party confirming that, in fact, my initial analyses of the matter are the most likely explanation of the matter. So there was a bad interpretation on my part as well in regarding the email she sent as simply saying "You're wrong." and a misunderstanding on her part from the voice mail. I am glad that it was resolved and that everything was clarified between us since I prefer for work relationships to be amiable.

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