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How you know your IT Dept. sucks...

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JoJaBuckeye

JoJaBuckeye

First we take Michigan--then the whole world!
When you have to send them an email like this: (names and details changed to protect the guilty)

See text in red/bold for the gist of it...

Dear IT Babe,

I periodically test our connection to the outside world on the internet.
The results for Feb 13pm and Feb 14am are deplorable.The Feb 13 pm speed was 81 kbps - that's kilobits, not Kilobytes. This is slower than dial-up.

On Feb 14 in the am, 116 kbps, 15 Kbps. This is barely faster than dial-up.
Compare that to Denver office results of 1833k and 229K.These connection speeds are the slowest I've encountered to date. It now takes approximately 4 minutes to get a map to display on mapquest and over 1 minute for some screens to appear in SAP. My frustration level is maxed out as I try to achieve the rigid performance standards for my position.

The connection speed is having a direct impact on my ability to fulfill my duties to an acceptable level. The connection speed was unacceptable and my results from the 13th and 14th show that the connection to the Ft. Collins Region Center now fails to achieve unacceptable levels.

Please help!

Signed,
Frustrated IT Hostage
 
iambrutus;763669; said:
what type of connection do you have? How long has this been going on. you do know that it could easily be a problem with the ISP right - and not necessarily it the problem of you IT department.
Click to expand...

Ongoing problem, but has nothing to do with me so I don't know the answers. Someone I know sent this to their IT dept.
 
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Are your SAP servers kept at another site?

If so, this could be a warning that your site's routers are bad/going bad. SAP packets are larger than those of many other programs, so when SAP starts to run slow at a remote site, it could be an indication that your routers aren't able to effectively handle all of the communication information.

When I experienced this problem in the past, with some of our regional sites, it was due to the hardware being used. We had acquired several regional sites that already had their networks in place. It turned out that once we replaced their routers things worked fine.
 
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JoJaBuckeye;763643; said:
The results for Feb 13pm and Feb 14am are deplorable.The Feb 13 pm speed was 81 kbps - that's kilobits, not Kilobytes. This is slower than dial-up.

On Feb 14 in the am, 116 kbps, 15 Kbps. This is barely faster than dial-up.
Click to expand...
Not trying to be a jerk, but you should keep in mind that dialup is 56 kilobits/second (kbps). It is still a terrible problem to have, but it is never a good idea to tell the IT people technical stuff when you don't have your technical stuff right.
 
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Hrm... if I received this letter I would then be going through someones e-mail to find something to bust their ass for, and believe me, there is always something. Now, more for the letter content itself there's a few things to consider here.

1) What is the primary type of connection? This matters a lot, where things like DSL may have a slower upload cap and that can easily be consumed throttling the download as a result.

2) What services are ran at the company? Things like VoIP and large data transfers can easily consume bandwidth, also, are things like streaming open to the company?

3) What is the acceptable use policy at the company? Are looking at sites like youtube etc allowed?

4) What's the IT budget and how many users are there to consider? Often times bandwidth problems will occur but upper management sees IT as smoke and mirrors, that we make these problems occur and as a result rarely want to improve the environment.

There's a ton of issues, saying this means your IT department sucks is not fair unless you know the whole story. A group of awesome techs and administrators are going to look like they suck if the technology is sub-par or worse yet, broken.

One last note, the IT dept is the last enemy you want in any company. When Management tells me to start investigating someone there's 3 steps we take.

1) We look at the security system to verify the time's they come and go match their clock in times.

2) We look at their email, everything here is archived for 7 years so odds are if you ever received a dirty joke, picture or other unacceptable dataset it's saved.

3) Traffic logs, what sites have you visited? are they all work related? Hope so.

Just some food for thought.
 
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To OCBucksFan:
I find it interesting that your first instinct is to bust the ass of an employee who has encountered a serious problem and brought it to the attention of I-T. You would never work for me if your first instinct is to retaliate and your second instinct is to ask serious questions regarding the problem. From the author's tone, I SERIOUSLY doubt this is the first communication regarding the problem.
 
Upvote 0
TaterState;767951; said:
To OCBucksFan:
I find it interesting that your first instinct is to bust the ass of an employee who has encountered a serious problem and brought it to the attention of I-T. You would never work for me if your first instinct is to retaliate and your second instinct is to ask serious questions regarding the problem. From the author's tone, I SERIOUSLY doubt this is the first communication regarding the problem.
Click to expand...

That's not my first instinct but if I received a letter like this, yeah I would retaliate. Second, this would never occur on my network as I would have addressed this long before it got to a point where a modem was a faster connection, either by setting up load balancing or removing access to streaming/non business related sites.
 
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Upvote 0
JoJaBuckeye;763643; said:
When you have to send them an email like this: (names and details changed to protect the guilty)

See text in red/bold for the gist of it...

Dear IT Babe,

I periodically test our connection to the outside world on the internet.
The results for Feb 13pm and Feb 14am are deplorable.The Feb 13 pm speed was 81 kbps - that's kilobits, not Kilobytes. This is slower than dial-up.

On Feb 14 in the am, 116 kbps, 15 Kbps. This is barely faster than dial-up.
Compare that to Denver office results of 1833k and 229K.These connection speeds are the slowest I've encountered to date. It now takes approximately 4 minutes to get a map to display on mapquest and over 1 minute for some screens to appear in SAP. My frustration level is maxed out as I try to achieve the rigid performance standards for my position.

The connection speed is having a direct impact on my ability to fulfill my duties to an acceptable level. The connection speed was unacceptable and my results from the 13th and 14th show that the connection to the Ft. Collins Region Center now fails to achieve unacceptable levels.

Please help!

Signed,
Frustrated IT Hostage
Click to expand...

Found the problem for you... :wink2:
 
Upvote 0
OCBucksFan;763893; said:
Hrm... if I received this letter I would then be going through someones e-mail to find something to bust their ass for, and believe me, there is always something. Now, more for the letter content itself there's a few things to consider here.

....

There's a ton of issues, saying this means your IT department sucks is not fair unless you know the whole story. A group of awesome techs and administrators are going to look like they suck if the technology is sub-par or worse yet, broken.

One last note, the IT dept is the last enemy you want in any company. When Management tells me to start investigating someone there's 3 steps we take.

1) We look at the security system to verify the time's they come and go match their clock in times.

2) We look at their email, everything here is archived for 7 years so odds are if you ever received a dirty joke, picture or other unacceptable dataset it's saved.

3) Traffic logs, what sites have you visited? are they all work related? Hope so.

Just some food for thought.
Click to expand...

TaterState;767951; said:
To OCBucksFan:
I find it interesting that your first instinct is to bust the ass of an employee who has encountered a serious problem and brought it to the attention of I-T. You would never work for me if your first instinct is to retaliate and your second instinct is to ask serious questions regarding the problem. From the author's tone, I SERIOUSLY doubt this is the first communication regarding the problem.
Click to expand...


In my experience, this is how most IT / technical customer help sections are. The civilians we had in the military were complete dicks and condescending, as were all ITs I've dealt with from companies.
They absolutely hate dealing with people who know just as much, or at least more than a stereotypical "soccer mom" should (in their estimation).
For instance, a couple years ago I bought a wireless card (b/g) for a laptop w/Win2k on it. XP was out and perhaps most-common, but the card said it specifically supported 2k. I got everything installed textbook, it didn't work. I read through some material and discovered the installation program wasn't working how it was supposed to (some functions and buttons were completely missing). So I DL'd all the relevant software from their site and reinstalled 2 or 3 times, with the same result. Contacted IT and they acted like I was an idiot the entire team "reinstall drivers, restart computer, etc." Finally they suggested I rma it -- so I did. Next one comes in, same damn problem. I had been troubleshooting electronics for 5 years at the time and knew it was a software problem. It was obvious to me. So I tell them that (note that all this convo between me and them is archived under the same customer code -- so they have the entire history at their disposal everytime we talk.) They just keep sending me form-letters about reinstalling and downloading and shit. I finally just gave it to a friend who had XP -- and he bought me a wireless that worked. Six months later (I wouldn't let them "resolve" the "customer complaint" so I checked them out every 2 or 3 weeks), I saw that they had an entirely new version for Win2k. Imagine that.
I've got other stories too... many examples of IT guys being dicks and holier-than-thou.
 
Upvote 0
23Skidoo;768091; said:
In my experience, this is how most IT / technical customer help sections are. The civilians we had in the military were complete dicks and condescending, as were all ITs I've dealt with from companies.
They absolutely hate dealing with people who know just as much, or at least more than a stereotypical "soccer mom" should (in their estimation).
For instance, a couple years ago I bought a wireless card (b/g) for a laptop w/Win2k on it. XP was out and perhaps most-common, but the card said it specifically supported 2k. I got everything installed textbook, it didn't work. I read through some material and discovered the installation program wasn't working how it was supposed to (some functions and buttons were completely missing). So I DL'd all the relevant software from their site and reinstalled 2 or 3 times, with the same result. Contacted IT and they acted like I was an idiot the entire team "reinstall drivers, restart computer, etc." Finally they suggested I rma it -- so I did. Next one comes in, same damn problem. I had been troubleshooting electronics for 5 years at the time and knew it was a software problem. It was obvious to me. So I tell them that (note that all this convo between me and them is archived under the same customer code -- so they have the entire history at their disposal everytime we talk.) They just keep sending me form-letters about reinstalling and downloading and shit. I finally just gave it to a friend who had XP -- and he bought me a wireless that worked. Six months later (I wouldn't let them "resolve" the "customer complaint" so I checked them out every 2 or 3 weeks), I saw that they had an entirely new version for Win2k. Imagine that.
I've got other stories too... many examples of IT guys being dicks and holier-than-thou.
Click to expand...


most IT guys come off as pricks because they are jaded from users that don't tell them the whole story. ie - i don't know what happened, i was just sitting there and all of the sudden - bullshit. I've done help-desk support for 8 years now and I've heard every story. I'm cool with the people that will admit that they don't fucking know everything - because i don't know everything either (but i know where to find answers), but i will blow my top on people that try to "fix" the problem themselves without first communicating it to IT - because at the end of the day, even if a user fucked it up by trying to fix it, it always comes back on the IT guy. The worst user (and big papa can tell you that i'm not making this up) will try to fix all of the comptuer problems in her department - because her son "knows comptuers" - then when she has fucked it up bad enough, she will come talk to IT - or better yet, send an email and just say that the computer is "acting up" - if there were no repercussions i would curb stomp that cunt.
 
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