Well apparrently not. As I've stated before, I used to work in a "White Collar" type environment. The job that I primarily did was the implementation and maintenance of all the systems inside the "Operations Center". When I wasn't doing that, I was creating reports to track all of the different metrics invilved with call centers, and also actively monitoring the performance of all the North American call centers and thier clients.
When I arrived at the facility where all this took place, there were twelve "Training Computers" inside a conference/training room. When I left, there was a state of the art Ops Center with such amenities as: 16 individual PC's all routed through a KVM switch feeding to 8 20" flat-screen monitors, a 4 by 12 foot Data Wall, News and Weather feeds, and a drop-down digital projector. This whole setup wound up costing around $650,000. I'm not saying that I did all of this, but I for damn sure had a hand in it.
Anyway. Before I left work this evening, my cell phone rang, and it was one of my coworkers from my previous job. This was a guy who I haven't spoken to in around ten months, and he just called me up out of a clear blue sky. It was nice talking to him and all, but I got the strange sensation that he wanted something from me.
Now I'm a nice guy. The guy was having some trouble with a system that I initially implemented, and I know that he was never very tchnically inclined, so I helped him out. Or so I thought. After the fourth time my phone rang, and it was him, I just decided that I wasn't going to answer the phone anymore. I hated to do it, but "for the Love of Jeff" I don't work there anymore. Here's a reason why.
Much as I hate to brag (yeah right) but I predicted that sort of thing a long time before it actually happened. I'm observant that way. Beware my employer. When I quit, your business is going straight to hell in a handbasket, or you haven't paid me enough.
Posted by Johnny - Oh at August 6, 2004 12:19 AMI do find stuff like this astounding. I don't blame your former co-worker of course, but you think he would kind of understand.
I got laid off 4 1/2 years ago. Almost the entire plant shut down except for one small group. They called me for awhile, but that stopped after about 6 months.
Posted by: Boudicca at August 6, 2004 04:15 PMI was layed off from Tropicana 2 years ago. I left the Wal-Mart account 1 year before that. I still get calls asking about stuff pertaining to the WM stuff. I still get calls wanting my opinion on stategy and retail execution.
I love it! It's a huge boost to my ego. Like you, I predicted that things would crash and burn based on the systems that were being put in place. It does my heart good that they miss me. A bit of an ego? Yep.
Posted by: Tammi at August 7, 2004 10:13 AMAfter all these years of working with computers and only semi-computerliterate people, I am not at all surprised. Most people working in IT have no clue what they're doing.
The most recent fun I had was some guy who is in the IT department of my client. We were setting up a VPN - this moron thought it could be done in a couple of hours. (yeah right - sheesh - especially when they use a CISCO firewall and he knows nothing about it). Several days later - he was getting a mysterious error and insisted the fault was on our end - couldn't be his end!!! I finally told him to send me a copy of the error message. I googled it and within 5 minutes I had the answer - it was his firewall that had a limit on the number of characters in a certain password! This moron couldn't even look it up in his own manual! I (who never ever used a Cisco product) was the one who had to tell him this!!!
Yeah, lots of incompetent people out there.
Posted by: Teresa at August 7, 2004 05:04 PM