Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Babies are less frustrating than governments……
Photo today is of my niece Grace – who I think is about the cutest thing ever at the moment. At ten months, she’s past the crying-all-the-time stage and now communicates mainly through smiles and random noises. She’s pretty awesome.
Looking at this picture, helps me to erase the stress caused by the fact that for nine days now my work-computer has been in the IT shop for what is a basic system reinstall. Nine days! And they tell me it’s going to be another two, or maybe it won’t be until next week, but they don’t really know. What I know? If they had given me the tools (like an operating system install disk) I could have wiped the drives clean and reinstalled that system myself and it would have taken one day. One day! Not eleven.
So people – this is what short-staffing, layoffs and “centralization” of service in the federal government look like. It means that for several days I have had limited capacity to do my job – testing software for my team, developing templates for our new website, working on information architectures for new web sections – because I do not have the machine on which all my information is stored, and on which my software and drive mapping is available.
(I was offered a “loaner” laptop – five years old and without the software I need – but what’s the point? Instead I’ve been desk-surfing since last week and occasionally bringing in my own personal laptop so I can at least do email (that is, if I go downstairs to the coffeeshop to get wifi; I’m not allowed to hook my personal laptop into the network).)
Really, what’s frustrating? It’s all about the privatization game – that’s where a Conservative government like ours wishes to privatize something like IT services and so they force them to the breaking point by cutting back and reorganizing them in untenable ways. At this juncture we’re all so fed up that we welcome IBM or whatever company gets the bid… and then the costs poured into IT services immediately go up again because that private company can just keep jacking up its price in order to “meet service levels”. It doesn’t save the taxpayer money of course….
But. Baby pictures! And of course, I am filing a formal complaint about staffing levels. Because I can’t say nothing about it can I?
Red Cedar 
A gorgeous picture like that certainly gets things in perspective! X
I can feel your frustration, but take a deep breath and play with the baby for 10 minutes and stress will be gone .. I hope 🙂