Blame someone else and get on with your life

by Alan Woods

The office server kaput-ed on Monday, and all hell broke loose. It's really tiring just to get everything in order. I tried not to get too involved because really, I'm not paid enough to also be the office IT person y'know. Neither am I qualified. Server-stuff is not my thing.

Actually, it first showed symptoms that something was not right with it since last Friday morning. I came to work to find that 'someone' had shut off the server. It puzzled me but I didn't question anyone at that time, lest I appeared suspicious of my own colleagues.

However, when it happened again on Saturday, as Cyn discovered when she came in to work that day, I thought I'd take a closer look at it on Monday.

On Monday, I discovered the server has auto shut down itself again and the mail exchange failed. I called our IT technician to get him to check. He was not helpful lah. He didn't see any urgency in our predicament. He just said he'll get someone to access remotely to check what's wrong.

I mean, really? What can you discover by just doing things remotely and when you can't see the server physically. Sigh. Seriously, this guy frustrates me to no end! I don't know why Mr G still wants to use their service, really.

Anyway, he couldn't solve our email problem that day. Something about corrupted mail box, that's all he said. And he'll send someone the next day to check it out. Well, that was too late because when the technician did came in on Tuesday (the server has auto shut down itself that morning again, btw), just as he was about to reboot the server again to restart the email service, it totally failed to start Windows. Why?

Because the bloody fan hasn't been working since we don't know when and the system auto shut down itself because it has over heated! The over heating has caused some damaged to the motherboard. The now damaged motherboard has created some havoc to the system, hence it couldn't find the OS.

Can he not guess something was not right when I kept on telling him the system auto shut down itself in the first place?

We got to know more about the problem when we decided to call another company to help us on Wednesday. Our current one were so unresponsive (and irresponsible, I might add). He wouldn't come in and didn't even bother to answer my calls that day because, guess what? It's their public effing holiday! So now what? We don't have to work, too?

I really don't know how he could have left us stranded like that.

See, if he had send someone on Monday, his technician would have discovered the problem, somethings could have been avoided whilst somethings could have been resolved earlier. On Tuesday when it seemed that we couldn't revive the server at all, I kept on asking him for a contingency plan while waiting for IBM to get us the parts (on the phone no less because apparently, he was too busy to come visit us on site), but he couldn't even think of one.

After nearly three days of not being able to work with the files that was on the server, the Hotness asked me to get the bloody data hard disk out and stick it to the shared PC. Strange isn't it? The non-IT guy had to think of a contigency plan for our 'supposed' IT-consultant.

To cut the story short, I got the IBM folks to come in on Friday to replace the fan and motherboard. Once the server was up and running, I got the other IT outsourcing company to help repair our mail exchange problem. We are thinking of using their service to maintain our server from now on as well. I'm so impressed by all the 3 engineers I met. They know their stuff y'all!

But still, all those four days... precious time wasted!

xoxo