This is an entry about my job.

My philosophy on work ethics is very simple. If you're providing a service to someone, you do the best job you can, regardless of what other people want you to say or do. Unfortunately, as with any organization that has a "corporate" branch, conflicts of interest are bound to arise. Corporate people, some of whom I'm sure may actually be human, hate it when work is being done without such things as "procedures" and "processes". So, when the slightest problem arises, instead of waiting to see if it will fix itself, they find it necessary to justify their jobs by coming up with Yet Another Set of Processes to follow.

We had a good deal of problems during the first part of my computer-swapping job. Someone, somewhere, had decided that migrating an entire system of Win98 machines to XP machines wouldn't be any problem at all. Needless to say, this person should not have been allowed to use his own computer, much less make large-scale time predictions about an entire hospital's computer system. Of course, we suffered for it. 80% of the time, we quickly realized, the end-user had software unique to that department (And less commonly, unique to themselves.) that they had to have. Long story short, first quarter was a disaster. But we learned, and about three quarters of the way through, we were doing much better than when we first started. We found ways around the software problems that plagued us, uninstalled Adobe Reader 6 and got rid of the stupid conflict that it causes with the XP version of the Windows Installer, and in general, made the computers work.

Which of course, was a problem.

It first came in the form of an e-mail that looked more like a virux hoax than a legitimate e-mail. "Someone has been installing Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 on the machines. THIS IS TO STOP IMMEDIATELY! This application has not been approved by Internet Security. If someone needs this application to work, they will have to submit a security request form, etc etc.". "It's Adobe Acrobat!" I thought to myself. "They've got to be kidding.". I was, of course, mistaken - and this was just the beginning. Almost every other day, we received another procedure to follow, until they had the entire swapout process scripted, with no room for deviation. If problems were encountered, no matter how small, we had to stop what we were doing, and report it to the support guys. We weren't supposed to make the users local admins for a one time run of an app in order to set registry settings. We had to use SMS to install everything - nevermind that SMS is the slowest technology ever invented by man and there was an install sitting right there on the network, not to mention that half the time, SMS-installed apps don't bloody work. The best one was receiving a manual approximately eighty pages long with details of the entire process, and being told that we had to follow these instructions each and every time we did a computer - which meant having the book open to the correct page and actually reading the instructions we had followed so many times before - absolutely no deviations allowed. And so on. And of course, the procedure was that way "for a reason". Yet at the same time, there was the unspoken threat of losing our jobs if we didnt' go faster. And what made this even more frustrating was everyone else's acceptance of it. Everyone else in my department seemed almost afraid to question this obvious stupidity. Typical conversations would go like this:

Me: Doing it this way will screw the users over. Other guy: I know, it'll do more harm than good. Me: Then why are you doing it? Other guy: Well, we were hired to do this.

I hate corporate stupidity. I believe in doing what will help the end user the most, not following a stupid set of rules that corporate people feel compelled to shove down our throats for the sake of conformity. There is no reason for them to get involved in my line of work - their involvement in any aspect of I.T. is absolutely unjustifiable. And I have no qualms about ignoring their stupid, ignorant rules and regulations and procedures and processes if it will help the end user do his or her job better or easier.