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| I had the most amazing meeting today by Zsenitan 10/08/2008, 9:29pm PDT | ||||
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| Even though I'm unemployed, I have this peculiar position where I do all these white collar odd jobs, one of which is being the primary procurement channel for all equipment used by anyone who gets paid on an hourly basis. It's complicated. Anyway I also procure operating equipment for new sites.
Despite the way that I spend 9/10th of every day being a technician and ordering computers and shit, I don't work for the IT department. There's a totally different crowd that does what we call "IT" and what appears to ultimately be the in-house Vendor Of Obstruction. I'm not complaining about this. It's very useful to have a reliable source of project delays. To get to the story: I had a meeting with the COO and my boss and the head of IT today, in which the head of IT said that he ought to be doing all procurement. That's fine, I have ten other white collar odd jobs I could be doing instead of procurement. But then the thing is that this guy said in the same meeting, in front of the same people, that he has no intention of doing any work whatsoever. I was astonished by this and at one point was reduced to the white collar odd jobber's expression of last resort: pitching my pen into the crook of my laptop and massaging the bridge of my nose. (I could be fired for that.) It's tough to explain how pissed I was. I will give you some examples of what happened. IT: Well I feel that all equipment should be shipped here first for testing, then sent out to sites. My boss: I'm not sure how much good that will do us. Zseni: It costs $300 to ship that equipment back out to the site, per station, and we're not even talking about the potential damage incurred by the reshipment in the first place. IT: Well if we test it first, we know it works. Zseni: Right, but let's say we test it, then ship it. Then it's damaged in shipping. What do you do? IT: Call a technician. All that stuff is under warranty. Zseni: The rhino-polishers, for example - you can't get a tech out for that in less than 48 hours anyway. We just send replacements and ship the damaged stuff back for a tech here to work on. IT: All my vendors operate on a 24-48 hour turnaround. COO: *starts doodling in his notebook. He turned a colon into a little angry face, then crossed it out.* IT: If it's shipped here first, we don't have to pay sales tax on it, too. Man it doesn't seem like much on paper! But it was really awful! The COO tried to determine whether there was some overlap in the shit I order (peripherals, site equipment, shipping bullshit) and the stuff IT orders (network hardware.) There isn't any overlap, by the way. COO: So what do you order that Zseni orders? Can we take a look at straightening that out? IT: You know, computers and network - we should really order everything that goes out to the site. I get excellent prices from my vendors. COO: Okay. So what exactly - like what does Zseni order that you need to order? IT: Well the printers, for example. COO: You want to order the printers. IT: No, it's just that it's a part of the network, right. You have to plug it in to the network, so we should really have it here for testing. Zseni: Okay, the printers. Anything else? Here's a list of everything I procure that you can plug in to an electrical socket. IT: We already order universal power supplies... Zseni: for the network hardware? Or for the operator stations? IT: I have a really good vendor for power supplies, I don't even know why you're ordering that. Zseni: well, they are a peripheral to the stations. If you order them for the network hardware, I don't know anything about that. IT: I mean I get these - like, a $60 power supply, it doesn't even make sense to spend $20 on shipping that. Zseni: we don't pay shipping on those. Are we talking about the same kind of power supply? IT: The power supply vendor I use has a warehouse right here in town. Anyway this went on for an hour and a half. I couldn't believe how much this guy gets paid to get in the way. He gets paid an amazing amount of money to essentially say "no, you're wrong" to anything that happens in his vicinity. He's a "no, you're wrong" motion-sensitive autobot. |
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