The Grumpy IT Admin

Yes I am English and I speak English English (International or British English to you), this has a few quirks for you that you may come across as you read my post, probably the first and most irritating is that our dates are the other way around so today is 31/12/10 not 12/31/10, I know you will find this confusing and annoying because I do when looking at US dates. Also we put a lot of Us in things where you won’t expect them to be like colour, I’m sorry but it’s just our quaint way of doing things, also you use Z when we use S as in authorise. We pay a lot of money to use our version of English, and sometimes we even pay extra to use yours, just ask Microsoft and Adobe who seem to forget sometimes. Lucky for you I am neither Glaswegian nor a Geordie or you just plain wouldn’t understand a word I was saying as they are completely mangled versions of the English language with its own words and phrases spoken in accent that is as thick as treacle. Aussie English, Irish English, In

Dell is one of those companies that has lots of good looking kit but manages to shoot itself in the foot when it comes to real quality. We buy a lot of Dell PCs and have moved to using their EqualLogics kit for server storage. However their support in the UK is not the best organised. For example when the EQ hits a problem it will send an email home to Dell, the Euro support team in Ireland then contact me and ask for the logs, I generate them and have to send them to myself and forward them on to the support person despite the EQ sending the diagnostics to Dell as the support team in Ireland, for some reason not revealed to me, can’t easily access the diagnostics that EQ emails to Dell. Having sorted out a replacement disk it is invariable delivered in a timely fashion but whoever comes and picks up the disk seems to be running a keystone cops type of affair. We have had to replace 4 disks recently and had about 10 phone calls to arrange pickups of various quantities of drives, on

This Blog is all about me trying to make things work in my world of IT. I work in the publishing industry, though I am based in the less glamorous distribution arm, however we have all the interesting bits of the datacentre based within 10 meters of my chair. We are a reasonable sized company which is part of a much larger company that is based in the US, which is itself part of an even bigger company in based in Europe. Someone is in charge of all these bits but to be honest I don't know who is in charge of the IT bits in the UK let alone anything else, they have names and faces on pictures but I have never met them or been around their house for tea or a glass of wine so they are just a nameless horde. Anyway, we buy stuff from the big companies like HP, Dell, SAP and Microsoft, we use HPs VMS (that is someone else's problem) but we also buy crap stuff from elsewhere despite way to many meetings before we realise that the important person had already made their mind up.