Every so often I have a scan through the spam email folder at work, to make sure that the spam filter is doing its job properly and not marking stuff as spam that isn’t really. I noticed a message in there today which looked a bit different to the others so I opened it for a closer look. What I read was the most irritating piece of tripe I’ve had the misfortune to cast my eyes over. I was going to post it here and disassemble it for you, but instead I’ll direct you over here, where the email is presented in its entirety and then shot down in flames.

Well, if I thought April was going to be any quieter at the office than March was, then I was wrong. Today has been just as manic as the last couple of weeks, and the fact we had to re-enter all the details for the stocktake because I forgot to reset the figures on Friday didn’t help. Today’s also the day the new price manual comes into effect, so I’ve had to make sure that the computer data on all our branches is up to date.
Throw into the mix a bug in our new order entry system and a new branch opening up abroad (where I have to talk the local support guy through setting up a “clean” copy of the order entry system) and the hours have certainly flown by. Did I mention I’m the only person in the IT department at the moment? Fortunately everyone else has just left me to get on with it, but I still hope and prey that I’ve not made any silly mistakes anywhere along the line. Please let there be a light at the end of the tunnel…. please.

The expected deluge of spam emails didn’t quite arrive. It was more like a mild flood than a tidal wave. During Friday I got about 1500 of the blighters, over the weekend about 600 more. During the day today, about 6. So I didn’t quite have the major clean-up operation I expected. Good job, really, as everything else seemed to happen at once. Ever felt like you’ve done a week’s work in one day?
Then, on the way home, my car decided it was going to have a sick day. I’d just got to the top of the motorway, about 10 miles from home, when the “exhaust control indicator” started flashing on the dashboard and the car lost power. Not all power, but enough to be noticeable. I managed to stagger home and thanks to my dad lending me his car (thanks Dad!) I’ll be able to get to work tomorrow. Although if tomorrow is anything like today, I’ll be joining my car in coughing and spluttering by the roadside.

Must be a new one, because all of a sudden I (as postmaster and general IT dogsbody in the office) am getting hundreds, if not thousands, of “returned mail: user unknown” emails from non-existent people. However, all these are addressed to non-existent people at one of our domains, so they all come back to me. They started arriving about 11am and bty 5pm our anti-spam software has caught 729 of these so far, but it has missed another 1485. I’m going to be snowed under with spam when I get in to work on Monday morning…… oh joy.

In the last week we’ve:

• installed a later version of the accounts package

• moved the old accounts package from an old server to the current server
• moved the last half dozen users off the old server on to the current server
• switched off the old server (three years after buying the new one)
• installed spam filtering on the email server
• decided to go live with the new shop order entry system next week

It’s all go,go,go at the mo!

When you’ve got one guy coming in to the office to upgrade the accounts system, and another chap from a recruitment agency coming in to sort out the requirements for the position of IT Manager, it’s probably not a good idea to think, when your alarm goes off at 6:45am, that it’s Sunday and therefore perfectly alright to go back to sleep for another three hours.

Heh, well I survived the first day on my own without anything major going wrong. Actually I’m putting myself down here because I’ve run the department on my own for several months in the past – the only problem being that something went wrong eventually.
Today I had one of the directors wondering where I got some figures from (answer: I can’t remember, this is what the figures were set to a year ago and if they were wrong surely someone would have noticed by now) and an hour later got told that the figures were correct and don’t worry about it. I wasn’t worried. I didn’t set the figures in the first place.
And finally, finally, they told me the plan of action. There’s a representative from an IT headhunting company coming in next week to suss out the requirements for the replacement IT Manager. Which is cool. Maybe I can slip them my CV on their way out, heheh.

I got an email from my sister-in-law today. At least I think it was from her. She used someone else’s account at work to send it, so it could have been someone else. But that isn’t important right now. The message was thus:
Subject: blog
apparently it needs updating, i dont believe it myself as i know your keeping to your new year resolution about posting nearly every day.
Talk about subtle, huh? I could get bitchy and mention that there’s no sign of a blog coming from her direction, but that would be below me. I don’t do things like that.
Anyway, on to the post. Today is actually quite an important day for me at work. Or tomorrow is the important day. Whatever. My boss, the guy who was hired to be my assistant when I was IT Manager and then took over my role when it became apparent that the pressure was getting to me and I was making mistakes, has today finished serving out his one month’s notice and left. He hasn’t given any precise reasons for leaving, but after this event I don’t think anyone is the least bit surprised. Although his card and collection didn’t quite go smoothly. Half the people who wrote in his card thought he was taking early retirement, and I decided that a suitable leaving present for him would be a bottle of whisky, since we got him a bottle for his 60th birthday a couple of years ago and he didn’t seem to mind then. However he admitted to me on the way out that he doesn’t actually drink whisky. Oops, sorry….
So that leaves me in the position of being the only person in the IT department. They’re getting me to simplify and document pretty much everything, which will (they say) keep the place ticking over while I’m not there but will also (I say) reduce the company’s level of dependency on me. The situation, as see it, is as follows:
They’re not replacing my manager
They’re not going to re-promote me to manager
I’m not sure I want the job anyway
I could do with the salary though
They’d better not piss me off otherwise I will hand in my notice and go and find something else to do
I’m going to pass on all the regular daily and weekly jobs on to other people, and concentrate on the more interesting and important stuff, without having to take responsibility for any of it.
They have let me book off a week in May and a week in August (thought I’d get those bookings in before it all gets too hectic!)
H’mmm. Could work. Could be a disaster. We’ll just have to wait and see.

After the manic running around I’ve done for the last four weeks, I had a quiet day at work today. The chap at the software development company has a full workload now, and I’m trying to leave him alone for the rest of the week to get on with it, rather than blast him with more requests for tweaks and information.
I just hope he’s been working on our project and not someone else’s!

It’s time to make another post I think, mainly because I don’t like looking at my site and seeing a completely blank page!
I have been sooooo busy this month it’s unbelievable. Things have got manic at work in the last couple of weeks, mainly because I’m the only person in the IT department of a multi-national company. Well, two countries qualifies as being multi-national, and no the other country is not Wales! (In fact, make that three countries.)
I’ve been debating whether or not to post this story for a good few days now, and I’m going to risk it. I’m going to try and avoid any possible allegations of slander or libel by not mentioning anyone involved by name. Let’s see how it goes. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin….
There are three main people involved in this story, myself, my manager (Mr M) and the company chairman (Mr C). It all started way back on December 9th (pause for a moment while the screen goes all wobbly in a cheesy flashback style). First, a bit of background. We are in the middle of upgrading our IT systems and have called in a foriegn company to write an order entry system for us to use in our retail branches. This system is now 12 months behind schedule and Mr C is rapidly losing his patience with it. Fortunately I was not involved in the process of choosing this company, nor did I have any great input into the design or specification of the new system. We’ll just put aside the fact that I know every line of code in the current system like the back of my hand, shall we?
Anyway, Dec 9th was crunch day. Mr C was due to phone his counterpart in the foreign company to find out how close the system was to completion. To make sure he had his facts right, he phoned his IT department for clarification of the outstanding issues. Only problem was, this was the day Mr M had booked as a personal day, so it was down to me to brief the chairman. Of course, I didn’t know all the answers to his satisfaction (mainly because I was busy doing a lot of the day-to-day running of the office and wasn’t directly involved in testing the new system). So I got called in to the boardroom and was given a sound bollocking. I was very very tempted to hand in my notice there and then, and the only thing that stopped me was the fact I don’t actually have two or three months salary in the bank to fall back on. I think you’ll find my reaction was eminently understandable when I tell you that during this dressing-down I heard the phrase “the IT department is a waste of space” and “I have a friend that can give me a complete new system in two weeks”. H’mmmm….
Ok, so I survived that, Mr C decides that he’s prepared to wait until the following Monday, and if the system isn’t right by then he’s going to chuck it all in the bin. Friday comes and we get a new release of the system to test. Mr M looks at it on Friday and again on Monday morning. By Monday afternoon Mr C comes round and asks if it’s all ready yet. Mr M tells him it isn’t. Now, I can’t remember exactly how it all happened (partly because it was over a week ago now and partly because a lot of it happened out of earshot) but basically Mr C lost his temper and started ranting and raving. Apparently he’d been led to believe that one of the problems with the new system was a major problem, whereas in fact it’s the sort of thing that would only crop up four or five times a year and cost us a handful of quid each time. Nothing really to worry about on the grand scale of things. I heard raised voices in the boardroom, and then Mr M was called in. More raised voices. Then Mr C storms out of the boardroom and stands myself, Mr M and another colleague in an office and starts shouting and screaming at all of us. Now, this particular office is situated right in the middle of the building, so basically everyone in the whole company heard the ranting and raving. To his credit, Mr M remained calm throughout and responded in a perfectly normal tone of voice. I think the last straw came when Mr C accused Mr M of not being able to understand English (which in my opinion is not always the best form of man-management there is).
Finally Mr M said “I have nothing more to say on the matter” and Mr C stormed off back to the baordroom. At this point Mr M declares “I’m not staying here to put up with this” and he leaves the office. I haven’t seen him since. I spent the next 90 minutes twiddling my thumbs and waiting for 5 o’clock to come round (well, you would, wouldn’t you?)
The following day I had to summon all my will-power just to get out of bed in the morning and drive to work. I arrive half an hour late. No-one bats an eyelid. I spend the rest of the morning twiddling my thumbs, then bits of work start dribbling in. Since then a whole load of work has poured in and I have to handle the testing and installation of the new system pretty much on my own, as well as all the day-to-day work. Since I am the only person in the company who knows how a lot of this stuff works (certainly the only person who knows how to fix things when they go wrong), everyone is treating me very very gingerly at the moment. I was supposed to have this week off work but they asked me if I’d come in today to make sure all the end-of-year stuff went without a hitch.
Soooo, at the moment I’m doing all the work but on the same salary I was on last week. I don’t really know what I’m responsible for and what I’m not responsible for. I don’t want the manager’s job (if they offer it to me, haha, I had that job a few years ago it was “mutually decided” that although my programming skills are not in doubt, my management skills leave something to be desired. Maybe I should be taking lessons from Mr C, ho ho) and I don’t want to stay as an underling for the rest of my life.
Hence I’m trying to spend every spare moment in a book, learning all about programming windows-based applications with Microsoft VB.Net, which is all very technical but I’m slowly but surely getting my head round it. I just hope that once I’ve passed the exam (and at 90 quid a pop for that I’m going to make damn sure I’m prepared before I put myself in for it) then someone will recognise that I’m not a complete idiot and offer me a job. Permanent or contract, in my home town or 200 miles away, I’m not all that fussed at the moment.
So that’s my month so far, how’s yours going?