My momma told me...

...if you don't have anything nice to say, then say nothing. I don't know if I can do that this time.

My employers are going to red-tape themselves right out of business. My contract came up for renewal in mid-October. They renewed me for another 6 months, the maximum allowed by policy. That was nice, because knowing where my next mortgage payment will come from helps me sleep better at night.

However, and it is a huge however, they neglected to sign me up for another 6 months of network access. I'm not talking about my ISP, I pay for that, and it is up to me to make sure it is working. I'm talking about the privilege of logging into their network so I can do my work. On Wednesday when I logged in for work in the morning, I was able to connect to their VPN, but I could not use any of their services, like e-mail, chat, or remote desktop. I knew what this meant, I'd seen it every six months, like clockwork, since I started working for them. They'd turned off my account.

I called the Help Desk, and they confirmed that it was disabled. They told me my boss had to submit a request on an internal website. He did. A few hours later he received a message saying his request was fulfilled. It wasn't. The Help Desk confirmed that my account was still turned off. You might think the Help Desk could do something about it, but no, the group in charge of allowing me to work is a secretive organization that works solely from an e-mail drop-box, with no phone number, and no way to find the name of a real person belonging to the group.

The request to re-enable my account was assigned a case number: A141631. Don't you feel all warm and fuzzy? In order to communicate the failure of A141631, my boss had to send an e-mail with "A141631" as the subject to the mystery drop-box. He got back a message that they had assigned case number A141848 to his request to look into case number A141631's failure. Go ahead, sit down, my head is spinning too.

On Thursday morning, my friendly Help Desk person confirmed that my account was still disabled. Luckily, a few hours later, the cloak-and-dagger squad dispatched a message to my boss that A141484 had been resolved. Great, now I can get back to work!! Oh, if only it were true.

Do you recall that on Wednesday, I could connect via VPN? Well, on Thursday, I could not. My ever so helpful Help Desk person confirmed that my network account had been enabled (hooray!) but that my internet proxy account was disabled (boo-hiss!). Was my internet proxy account covered under the original request? Nope. Does the same group handle the request? Nope. Was there a phone number I could call to expedite the request? Nope.

This time ... get this ... I had to log on to an internal website, download and fill out form #210, sign it, have my boss sign it, and then fax (yes, FAX) it to the number listed on the form. Well that first step was a doosey since I could not log on the their network at all. Thankfully, my boss was kind enough to send the document to my gmail account. I printed it out, signed it, then scanned it back in as a PDF and sent it back to my boss so he could print it out, sign it, and fax it to Whoever-They-Are.

If you think there is something wrong with this process, join the club, my friend. A quick Google shows that the fax machine was invented in 1843. Here I thought I lived in the 21st century, the information age, but we're still using an antique process by which the 25 kilobytes of data from the original document is blown up to 272 kilobytes and, as a bonus, is no longer machine readable. What do you bet that on the other end of the fax line there is a computer which translates the fax data into a digital image and stores it in an optical database archive, wouldn't that be a hoot? (OK, I'll admit that my sense of humor might be a little skewed on this one.)

So, here we are, it is Friday morning, and I still cannot log in. Do I have anything nice to say? Well, I can say that the Help Desk people, while less than helpful, were very friendly. Hey ... that's it! I said something nice, so I can justify the preceding rant without upsetting my mother!