Penny Smart, Pound Foolish
I’ve worked at a number of companies where it seemed as if the IT department ran the entire show. The tail wags the dog at these companies and nobody seems to know why nor does anyone ever stand up and yell “Dookie in the Pool™”. Judging from the emails I get, this must be a recurring theme at a lot of companies. One writer tells of working at a company with an N-O department. Any and all IT requests however trivial, were initially met with an N-O.
In January of this year a certain company had moved locations. All new furniture, computers, telephones etc. Some of the software systems were upgraded as well. In mid-March, one of the sales managers could no longer access the telephone accounting system software; the system responsible for logging inbound and outbound telephone calls, talk time etc.
One would assume that a simple call to IT would fix the problem as the error message indicated a server connection issue. The “IT guy” who works out of a different location (quite possibly for personal safety reasons), blamed the issue on the software vendor and refused to even log in remotely to see first hand what the issue was.
What’s a sales manager to do? Call the software vendor about an internal server connectivity problem of course! The software vendor was very supportive (pun intended). More than a week later after a great deal of troubleshooting, the issue was still not resolved.
Fortunately the “IT guy” shows up in the office and gets conned into stopping by the sales managers’ office. Guess what? He can’t log into the application either and gets the exact same error message a full two weeks later!
The software vendor is called yet again. This time they get software engineers involved on conference calls, they provide what I’m quite sure was great advice given the unknown nature of the problem; try this, try that and try everything under the sun. Still, nobody could access the application.
In early April, in the midst of one of these support phone calls, someone at the software company (probably an underpaid smart person that most people don’t normally listen too) yells “Dookie in the Pool™” (not exactly but close enough) ”Wait a minute, your CFO cancelled the service with us on March 14th”.
A copy of the letter was faxed over and sure enough the CFO had indeed cancelled the service on March 14th, agreeing to pay the current invoice as well as the final invoice.
Of course nobody at this company bothered to check to see if the new software application had been installed and was up and running before they cancelled the contract on the old application and set into motion hours upon hours of wasted time and effort.
I hope that the final invoice is a real doozie in order to compensate for a real Dookie™.