Just Fix IT!

I just spent 15 working days in solving a problem at work that had to do with email routing. That’s about 24 calendar days. Something that had been working perfectly for years suddenly stopped delivering email.

It was all caused by human intervention into a system that has become highly fragmented when we became a part of a global business giant and having to work with their old but dominate email systems.

These email systems and routings have become so complex and as I stated fragmented, that no one person can understand the complete system at a high enough resolution to be a single source expert on fixing what goes wrong,

Last Thursday I was center attraction in a global voice conference involving support people in India, France, east coast USA and several here in Dallas plus myself.

I had already spent at least 12 working days trying to communicate with this “team” via emails, phone calls and a direct request to a real IT support human who happened to stick his head in my door. This real human did the most to get the right people together for the teleconference.

After the call on Thursday, I thought we had the problem nailed, but we didn’t. The one person that needed to be in the call wasn’t and I just spent two more days this week and one last week, still working on the same problem.

Today it is finally working for real.

It wasn’t just one issue, it was several and each one affected the other.

I liked the days when I could fix anything. I guess I still can but now it may take a complete support team. I also wasn’t fixing global systems in those days. That’s progress I suppose and I did learn a lot. So much for DIY. I just can’t afford all the time it takes to figure out who belongs on the team.

That’s why I can relax in my workshop or these blog pages. I control everything. Ha!