Tech Distress

After a relatively smooth week at work, my Friday degenerated rapidly after lunch. New photocopiers were being installed in the reprographics department; big, industrial-strength, kind of photocopiers – the kind that take your rough scribbled notes in one end and present you with the leather-bound first-edition of your thesis at the other. Well, okay, not quite that good, but they are pretty big and complex beasts and, like all modern copiers, they are not just copiers. Oh no.

Just as mobile phones, PDAs and MP3 players have all been merging into one technology, so photocopying, printing and scanning have been coming together into a single hybrid. In theory that’s great. Now you can print your document as normal, but instead of having to do all the finishing yourself, the copier takes care of the double-sided arrangement, getting four A4 pages onto a single A3 sheet, then stapling and folding it into a neat little A4 booklet for you to collect. When you need to scan, you don’t need an extra piece of hardware cluttering up your desk – you just go to the photocopier, press a couple of buttons and, bingo!, the image appears on your desktop. It’s the promise of digital technology being fulfilled… when it works.

However, while technology has advanced rapidly to bring these functions together, most of the people involved in the different industries haven’t advanced quite as quickly. Consequently the engineers that the supplier sends to install your whiz-bang new system, actually just assemble the photocopier unit itself and then hand software disks over to you to do all the rest of the install and make the damn thing do all the whizzy stuff that it’s been sold to you for doing. They don’t have a clue beyond the hardware. Harrumph.

I could even live with that if they didn’t take the whole day assembling the kit, and only come to you with the disks at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon, when I want to get away promptly!

I got the machine on the network and printing… but then it stopped again for no readily apparent reason. The copier techs all looked at me blankly when I asked them questions about network permissions and domain membership. In the end we decided to worry about it on Monday morning. There is only so much commitment I will give to the job when all the people who might know the answers to my questions have already gone home for the weekend.

My escape for the weekend was short-lived though: When I got home (cycling) there were a half a dozen missed calls on my mobile from the Helpdesk. It turns out that our main server in Bogotá had given up the ghost and now wouldn’t boot into Windows. Consequently nobody in that office could access their work, this meant it fell into the category of ‘A Big Deal’ so, still dripping from the shower, I was talking to IT’s ‘eyes and hands’ in Colombia, Rob, discussing the options with him. As the failure was severe, the options for trying to recover it were fairly limited, so I pointed him in the direction of the fastest one and left him to it. It seems to have worked as he didn’t call back and I can connect to the server fine this morning. Phew!