The Return of the Desk Move

[red-scully.livejournal.com]

Firstly thank you to everyone who showed their support when I posted on Friday about my hellish desk move experiences. Sadly, it continued this morning...

Oh lord, I picked the wrong Monday to catch a cold. Today the setting up of the PCs from Friday's desk move lasted from 8am until 12.30pm without a freaking break. OMFG, FAIL. Once again it was filled with assorted stupid...

Some users thought it would be a good idea to come in at quarter to 8. They then complained at us when we arrived at 8 because they couldn't work. BAH.

Some users decided that instead of waiting for us, they would set their kit up themselves. Whilst I admire their ability to work out what plugs in where (seriously), this was still a bad idea because half the network points hadn't been patched yet, so when they couldn't log in they came to complain at me. Instead of dealing with one desk's setup and network connection at a time, I had to do 3 or 4 at once, as they all came and told me OMFG I HAVE LOST TEH SHARED DRIEVZ!

At the other end of the spectrum were the users who sat at their desks waiting and, once I came to connect them up, STOOD OVER ME WATCHING AND TAPPING THEIR FEET. Props especially to the dude who thought it was appropriate to offer to lift the PC for me. Clearly, because I'm a woman, I'm incapable of lifting computers. Sigh.

And the defining moment of this entire debacle? When I was setting up the desk for User Who Has More IT Kit On His Desk Than I Have In Boxes On Top Of My Wardrobe. He'd taped a label with his name on to each bit of kit. When I picked up the subwoofer (seriously. Who needs a sub woofer in an open-plan office environment? IDGI), I found that he had GOT A PUBE STUCK UNDER THE TAPE.

D:

I should probably take a moment to say thank you to the users who rocked in at 9.30, got cups of tea and sat down to read the paper, not bothering me at all. They were perfect and I was extremely grateful. But nothing could detract from the horror of Pube Boy. I'll never be able to look him in the eye again as long as I live. KILL ME.

Comments

[kuang.livejournal.com]

Your pain - I feel it.

I remember doing a departmental move about 7 or so years back where we'd shifted almost 50 desktops across the city and had to provide completely new infrastructure. We'd got the cabling in tracked under the desks, the switches were racked and waiting to be configured and the telephony was all sorted to run through those same switches. We'd set the ports under each desk so that odd=PC and even=phone, and even tagged the phone ports with little red lightning stickers to show that they were powered. No phones as yet though - still held up - and no connectivity because the fibre guys weren't going to be doing their bit until the next day.

Cue enthusiastic users who come in, switch on, don't get a service and so decide to switch the network cable across from the odd to the even ports. Then, when that didn't work, they'd try the next machine. Three users fried 12 network cards in the space of ten minutes, and then slunk off without telling us.

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

That's award winning stupid.

I'll share the desk-move hell that I had to deal with last year. It goes something like this:



The other thing that galled me about it is this: you can all probably work out the problem from that handy post-it, right? Well, then why, after TEN MINUTES of explanation, did the office manager (an otherwise pretty bright woman) completely fail to grasp what I was on about?

(I have ranted about this here before, so sorry for deja vu)

[cheezemeister-x.livejournal.com]

We just moved our entire office recently. We had the cabling in the new place done in advance. I moved the core IT equipment (8 switches and 7 servers all rack-mounted), from shutdown to power-up in under three hours. Told the users to move their own fucking computers if they wanted one in the new building.

[attackgypsy.livejournal.com]

My attitude would be...

"Well, you don't need this. Or this. or this. You're not authorized to have these items, as they haven't been tested by IT."

Then seized said items for testing.

"Oh, they're NOT company property? Then why do you have them hooked up? That's an automatic writeup, you know."

[jecook]

THIS.

[jill-idle.livejournal.com]

might not have been a 'pube'. i know someone who has a beard, which loses a hair occasionally, and bears a striking resemblance. just cling to that thought. it helps. :)

[ravan.livejournal.com]

The last place I worked, office moves were done over the weekends. The office dwellers packed up on Friday afternoon, and were supposed to label their stuff with their name/office number. Then the movers came, and shifted stuff on Saturday. We got to set up all the IT gear, servers, and desktops on Sunday, and have it *Ready To Go* by 8 am Monday - and we had better be there to fix any problems, too.

This included IT packing our own shit, plus all the IT gear, plus helping pack the luser's kit when they couldn't manage to put their keyboard and cables into a plastic bag provided on Friday. We literally ended up waiting until the last of the programmers went home at 9 (because we shut down the routers) to check their packing and that they got all their cables.

We ended up doing the server rack move with the movers on Saturday, bring up the main stuff, and start the switch patch verification, plus setting up the desktops.

Sunday was almost easy, because we started each system as checked the switch patch in, and set up everything else in a "standard configuration".

Monday was the nightmare. The network topology was not quite right, and only showed up when in use by windows machines (some lame ass domain crap), not basic connection and DNS check. Nevermind that they still had to unpack the rest of their friggin' offices, if their computers didn't connect where they wanted when they wanted *we* were made of fail.

I hate office moves, especially with whiny, impatient windows users.

At least you didn't have to work all weekend and *still* have to put up with impatient gits.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

Did about 9 moves last friday morning myself. It was supposed to be me and my manager, but he went and caught himself the flu. :( Thankfully they were pretty good about it and even had a pot luck lunch planned because they knew moving would be chaos. Better yet, they invited me to partake in the food. There are days I <3 my users.

I have a lot of people offer to lift things for me, but I'll be honest, it's mostly because I have a history of back problems including having surgery on it about 1.5 yrs ago. Though I have a feeling some think I might be a weak female still. I have no pain and no restrictions after the surgery and have changed how I lift things, so I still rather do it myself. XD

My condolences though for all the hell your users put you through. *hands you a strong alcoholic beverage of your choosing* :)