Respecting thorns
There’s an old saying that if you want roses, you have to respect thorns. Company IT people can often seem like they are made mostly of thorns, but I would contend that the benefits they confer are such that they deserve respect at the least.
A co-worker of mine off-handedly insulted an IT guy last week, and the situation made me uncomfortable for a couple reasons. It wasn’t the first time he’s insulted one of the people charged with installing, upgrading, and maintaining our hardware and software, so on the one hand there’s a moral part of me that doesn’t like to see anyone disrespected–and on the other, there’s a purely selfish part of me that believes in another proverb: “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Our systems are locked down extremely tight. We can’t even download and install iTunes without supervisory approval–and even then, someone from IT has to perform the download and install from an admin account. It seems to me that it’s to our benefit to be nice to the people who do this work.
Anyway, to get to the story, last week we were upgraded to new Dell PCs running WinXP. Yes, I know it’s been about eight or nine years since XP was released. Yes, I know Microsoft is on the verge of not supporting XP any longer. This is how government works. For security and cost reasons, we aren’t on a corporate upgrade cycle. The United States Government is on my Uncle Dan’s upgrade cycle–you know, the uncle who lives way out in the sticks of West Virginia, still accesses the internet via dial-up, and runs a PC with Windows ME Home Edition. Maybe Uncle Dan will upgrade to XP this year, too, finally.