IT Department

I remember not long after I join this company, one of my colleague which was with the IT Department told me that the IT Dept will be closed down and he had been given a retrenchment.

At that time, never have I heard of such thing. To me retrenchment only happens to very senior people or when the company decides to shut down. The reason they shut down the IT at that time was they had outsourced the IT to 3rd party outsourcing company. It was a global initiatives and that from that day onwards, our company no longer have any IT people sitting around. All repair, formatting, hardware/software problem we do it via Net meeting and also sending the laptop to the service center.

Initially, it worked well, but as more and more complicated issued starts to appear, the user i.e. our own employees start to have comments on the service we got. It started with the comment that the outsourcing company using a non-English speaking engineer, typically Thai person to attend to our problem. We have such great difficulties understanding their instructions. Then, the problem escalated until once I heard a very high level manager had a problem with his notebook, when he called the help desk, he was treated badly / mistreated and not clear instructions is given.

That had triggered a snowball effect and the company started to look into the feasibility of outsourcing this to others. Eventually, as the outsourcing contract comes to an end, the company did not extend the service and today, we have an IT person sitting full time in the office.

When we heard that the IT will hire, the first name that all spoke out was the previous IT guy that was retrenched. However, things does not always goes as what we wanted. They company hired a guy from the outsourcing company instead.

I am not saying this person is not good. He had tonnes of certificates with regards to Windows OS System but he is lagging in our main mail software (it is not convenient for me to say the name of the software here). I notice whenever I have any problem with the mail software, he will take the PC and call his friend(s) over the net meeting / skype / chat in his old company to help him troubleshoot.

This is the incident that happen at the week I came back from Perth. I notice there is something wrong with my mail software. Then, I took the notebook to him, he admitted that he had requested help from his friend which is "more expert" in this software to resolve my problem.

The nightmare did not end there. From the day I took the notebook back after the repair, I begin to experience the software 'hanging' and the whole notebook not responding. Again, I told him my problem, and again, he tried a few attempts to resolve the problem but not successful.

Until yesterday, he promise to re-install the software for me and from about 10am in the morning, until now (its about 10am already) he had failed to resolve my problem, giving me reason that the software from the server is not installing properly and that the whole Pacific is facing this problem for new installation.

Yesterday evening at about 6.30pm, he called me in my house and told me to use the web-based e-mail address, however, only this morning he realised that to access to the web-based mail server I need to reset the password in the mail server which he had denied me access with his setup / repair yesterday.

I was so mad this morning when I realise this. Get real man, you are suppose to the the IT expert in our company, such simple issue you overlook and now, again, I have no way of accessing my e-mails and in today's working life, without e-mail is like 'lost' and not much of work can be done.

Now I can only sit around in the office, surf the net while waiting for him to restore my mail software back. Until then, I can't do any 'fruitful' work at all.

Hopefully everything can be restored by later today. Keeping my fingers crossed!!