Jobsworth IT

[Mac the Knife]

Rant mode ON

Trainees have an old PC in their office
It +/- works but 1GB drive is stuffed to the gills.
Dept. has no money to buy another one
Mac has good Seagate 1gig HDD in spares box so says
OK fellers, you can have this one.
Seccy phones up IT Dept to put it in. IT says,
No we can't put it in because it didn't come from us
Don't try to do it yourselves or we'll shut you down!
Dazed Mac phones up IT head, What is problem?
- Drive not purchased by us so would invalidate warranty
What warranty? - The warranty that we give when we issue machines.
So it's your own warranty you would break? - Yes.
And you won't change that? - No.
So you won't put the drive in? - No.
And we can't put the drive in? - No.
So what can we do? - Buy a new drive from us.
But there is no money for that! - Sorry.
So my boys&girls are stuck with a useless PC? - Fraid so.
We have the solution, but aren't allowed to use it? - Correct.
Doesn't that seem a bit silly to you? - Maybe, but we have to follow the rules.

Rant mode OFF

[Mac goes home and re-reconsiders emigration.]

[stagger]

You're talking about your company's own internal IT department? Support hasn't been "outsourced has it"? And they won't come and put in a drive for you - and they will refuse to service the PC in future if you put it in yourself?

If the PC has just 1 gig drive it must be fairly old and would probably be incapable of recognising the new large hard drives on the market today. So if you wanted to put in a new drive without changing anything else it would have to be a used one anyway.

If I were in your position I'd stick the drive in (assuming you know how to do this) and if some other problem arose with the system that meant I needed to call the IT guys out I'd sneak the drive out again before they arrived ;)

Here's a thought though - if your company is running some sort of mad internal market perhaps the IT department would be interested in buying a small used HD? Then they'd have one in stock to sell to you!:D

[Brit Abroad]

Unfortunately, attitudes and practices like that are rife in large organisations. There is very little flexibility and initiative nowadays.

People seem more interested in making their point and fighting their department's corner rather than looking at the wider picture of what would benefit the organisation as a whole.

Having said that, I can understand the logic behind IT support wanting to keep PC's at a standard configuration - otherwise, it would be chaos if each PC had different versions of hardware and software.

[Mac the Knife]

MyOrg's own IT Dept - yes. Support not outsourced.
PC is old 200MHz P1 with 64MB and 1GB HDD running Win95
The LBA BIOS should support at least 2GB (if not 4.2GB or 8.4GB).

I did think about doing it myself on the quiet (I've built several
machines and installed many drives, so I know what I'm doing)
but I'd have had to break the lead/wire seal on the case.

It's not IT policy to purchase 2nd hand material. Donations cannot be to specific Depts. but only to the Org. as a whole (who'll decide what to do with 'em).

As best I know 'pre-owned donations' are politely accepted and then binned [understandable as a general policy]. Unsolicited donations go to storage from which they tend to vanish if they have any genuine value.

I take the point about hardware/software standardisation, but this is an ordinary Seagate IDE HDD, not a laser cannon on a PDP-10/TOPS.

Told them that the drive had worked happily in a P1, a P2 and that I'd tested it recently in my P3, but all they could say was
- Yes, but what if it DOES blow up the mobo? (!?!?!)

Latest: Unusual request might be considered at next monthly IT committee. Apparently not much hope of approval. So it goes.

Do airlines have committees to ponder things like an another office bogroll? Can't anyone make simple commonsense decisions anymore? I dunno....