Hill’s Law of the Workplace: If you’re going to make friends with anyone in the workplace, make friends with HR, Payroll, the Office Manager, and IT.
The reason being, of course, that they are all in key positions to make your life so much easier, or to make your life a living hell.
About a week ago, the Powers That Be here in this office decided to adopt an office-wide screen saver. The one they chose has actually been floating around since ’97 or so in the company, and there have been occasional efforts by the office that generated it to roll it out company-wide. It’s designed to flash up information of interest to the workplace — company stock prices, safety bulletins, meeting notices, stuff like that.
There’s one, big, honking problem with this, of course: you’ll only ever see it when your machine is sitting idle for ten minutes. Which, for many of us, is, like, never. Or, if it’s true, it’s because we’re out of our chairs and in a meeting, or at lunch, and as soon as we sit down we start in at the keyboard again.
In other words, if you can see the screen saver, you’re not working very hard. That’s an exaggeration, and there are, in fact, folks who don’t use their computers as intensely as I do. But the general principle applies.
And, in fact, the folks who aren’t working on their computer probably aren’t reading the screen saver blurbs that come up. Right? If they are, yeah, they probably aren’t working very hard.
It’s also not good for getting info quickly. The office manager asked that a bulletin be put up there with a number to call if people see suspicious characters out in the parking lot. Think of that. My God, there’s someone suspicious out in the parking lot. Should I call 911? Should I call the front desk? Should I look on our office intranet page and find the building management number? Nah, I’ll sit here at my computer and not do anything for ten minutes, then wait for the bulletin to come up, then call that number.
Next up, what to do in case of fire …
The fact is, we’ve eleventy-dozen ways of communicating information. E-mail. Intranet pages. Memos stuffed in mailboxes. The PA system. Not only is another medium probably not necessary, but choosing one that half the folks will never see, and that everyone else will ignore, and that requires consistent and ponderous viewing to get through.
On top of that, it’s a POS application (and I’m not talking Point of Sale here). It was written for Win95, and hasn’t been updated since. It requires a half dozen reghacks to install on XP and Win2K machines (and to block people from going in and changing the stuff back).
And it requires access to a local Netware server. We’re phasing Netware out in our enterprise. And if you’re not connected to the interior network, it just comes up with the program logo and says, plaintively, “I can’t find the Internet.” Even if the Internet is right there, connected and buzzing.
And because it’s tied clumsily into the Netware client to control workstation locking, not only does it not work at all for machines without a Netware client, but it takes 10 seconds to go from mouse-wiggle to login-prompt when you want to break away from it, and more like 30 if you’re not connected to a Netware server at the time.
Harrumph. And, feh.
So this morning I was passing by one of our server ops guys, and he said hi, and we chatted for a few moments, and I asked whether anyone had been having problems with the screen saver. And he started to tell me about it, then mentioned someone for whom he’d disabled it, then, before I could figure out a legitimate way to ask, he offered to do the same for me.
[Insert maniacal laughter here.]
So back comes my beloved SETI@Home screen saver, and farewell to that ragged bit of bad code. Yup, being friends with IT is always a good idea …
