Arguments with Co-workers

Kris.

Kris works where I do. He used to be in IT as the webmaster, but is now officially the internet sales manager. He gets the leads from the website and hands them off to salesmen. However, he also serves as the self-appointed, unofficial IT guy for his department. And his department encourages it by dealing almost exclusively with him and, regardless of our wishes, he enables them by being a “yes man” to them. I wouldn’t mind it if he relieved me of work, but most of the time he ends up calling me to help him anyway, only now it’s several hours later, and by that time, it’s a bigger deal because the person he’s helping hasn’t been able to do their job for that long and everyone is stressed out. So he calls me and always needs me to drop what I’m doing to help them immediately because of the situation. This still happens despite the many attempts I’ve made to get people to call us instead of him.

So on Tuesday night, I was going to work with Greg, the support technician at Autosoft, to move the program to a newer server. I would do my part after everyone went home and the technician, being 3 hours ahead of us, would do the part only he could do before anyone came in Wednesday morning. Everyone went smoothly as far as we could tell. I knew the few people who used Finance Assistant would need me to change the configuration file to point to the new server name first thing in the morning, so I planned on doing that. Greg said he’d have to install one more piece in the afternoon. Not surprisingly, Kris called first thing in the morning to tell me that no one could get into the program, but to help Bob, the general sales manager, first. I went there and changed the settings to go to the right server. It gave some error about data not syncing, but it worked fine and I figured it had to do with what the guy still had to install. I fixed it on Matt’s and Kris’s as well.

I then went to Robin’s computer and did the same thing for her. The error came up and I called Greg to ask about it. He said it shouldn’t be doing that and we spent a few hours there trying to figure out what was wrong. We finally figured it out. The error was on the server, not on the computers connecting to it, so everyone else’s should have still been good. Bob walked by and I told him about it. He said he would go check to make sure it was still working fine and would call me if it didn’t.

Toward the end of the day, Kris called me and said that Bob complained to him that he couldn’t get it to work. Kris then proceeded to explain, like usual, how crucial it is that this be fixed right away because of how much money is waiting on it and how long he’s been without it working today and whatnot. Well, if it’s so crucial and all this money as at stake, then WHY THE HELL DIDN’T FUCKING BOB CALL ME FROM HIS DESK RIGHT WHEN IT HAPPENED!?

Me: It was working when I left his desk. He said he would call me if it didn’t work.
Kris: Well, he told me it hasn’t been working all day and he’s upset.
Me: Is it Finance Assistant that’s not working?
Kris: I don’t know, he didn’t tell me the details. Can you go to his desk right now and see what’s wrong?
Me: I’ll just call him and remote to his computer.
Kris: He’s not at his desk right now, he’s at Matt’s because his isn’t working. So can you go over there right now? I can meet you over there if you want.
Me: No, that’s fine. I’ll take care of it.

I got off the phone and remoted into Bob’s computer. It was locked and I can’t look up his password. I called Matt’s desk and got his password from him. Kris called and got Travis. He was on speaker phone and asked if I had left yet. Travis said I was at my desk. Kris said he would go over there and hung up. Whatever. Everything seemed to work fine from what I could tell. Kris got there and called me. I told him that everything seemed to work. Kris said that it was when he tried to print something, but didn’t know the details. He said he’d call Bob and call me back. He did and then recreated the error. We couldn’t figure it out and Greg from Autosoft had already gone home. Then:

Kris: Did this happen because of the server change?
Me: Yes.
Kris: Did the old server go down or something?
Me: No.
Kris: Then you guys need to get your shit together and not do this kind of stuff during business hours! It’s unacceptable!
Me: The guy at Autosoft was installing everything.
Kris: I don’t care! You didn’t plan it well enough.
Me: It’s the only way he would do it.
Kris: What’s his number?
Me: It’s just the main line and press the number for hardware.
Kris: Okay.

The next day Greg and I got it figured out.

Doug.

Unlike Kris, Doug is in IT. He’s the telephone guy. He knows less about computers than Kris does, though. Doug is twice my age and seems to think that I have a bad work ethic, bad attitude, and any time something goes wrong when I’m involved, it must be because I don’t care about how my actions affect other people. I was telling Nichole about my day. Doug called me from Auto Service and said that he just got notified that the 3 people there needed their workstations moved immediately to a temporary location in the next building. The building they work in is being remodeled. I went over and moved 2 of the computers over. They were filthy dusty! They wanted to leave one of them up until the 2 were up and working at the new location. Paul, the Auto Service manager, was impressed that the phones were working in the new location already. Doug said of course they were. He had all the wiring and data ports active a week ago. He mainly just oversaw the installation.

I got the 2 people all set up and working, then moved the last person over. They didn’t have any furniture set up for her, so I had to wait for them to do that. Doug had the phone and data ports, that are normally installed in a wall, hanging from the ceiling. It had 1 data port for her computer and 2 phone jacks. 1 for her phone and 1 for her VISA machine. One of the phone jacks had some weird thing plugged into it and the connector on the other end wasn’t plugged into anything. Doug had left, presumably because he was done, and everyone was there waiting on me to finish getting her hooked up. It was already lunch time. Not knowing where Doug went and not knowing what that thing was, but needing to finish hooking her up and needing all the ports, I unplugged it and hooked her up. She was all ready to go when Doug came in and saw the thing I unplugged.

Doug: Who unplugged this?
Me: I did.
Doug: You just cost me 15 minutes of wasted work!
Me: Sorry. I didn’t know what it was and I needed the port.
Doug: Don’t go unplugging my stuff!
Me: I didn’t know it was yours.
Doug: Why can’t you just leave stuff alone?
Me: I had to get her set up and I needed the port. Besides, I thought you were done setting them all up.
Doug: I wouldn’t have that plugged into it if I was done!
Me: I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know it was yours. You said you were done with your part and I didn’t know where you were. Everyone was waiting on me to get this done, so I did what I thought was best with the information I had.
Doug: Don’t unplug my stuff. I don’t go unplugging your stuff! You’re just being an asshole.

Then he walked out.