I'm About to Pop My Cork (long read) - Motorcycle-Journal Forums

**drgibson** · 05-24-2007, 11:08 AM

Ok Time To Vent!!!

Life has been taking it’s toll and I need to blow off some steam.

First we had to cancel our trip to Tennessee this year due to a lack of funds. (trying to figure out how to pay $4,500 to get the roof redone) Well now I get to cancel my vacation for the first week of June indefinitely due to a lack of personnel in my department at work.

And to top it off My dad’s brother (my uncle) died this last weekend and I was unable to attend the service. He was the last of my dad’s immediate family.

The stress at work has been being multiplied almost on a daily basis. There is a lot of change and we have had many issues that is complicating what we do.

Let me give you a brief history of the last 6 months at the company I work for.

First though let me say that I really like the company I work for, part of that stems from the fact that the owners (2 sets of brothers) are very down to earth and really try to balance out what is best for the company as well as the employees. This is a privately owned family business started in 1919. Now we are no small corporation, the owners is worth over $180,000,000... Each. We are in over 50 countries and never fail to make a profit. Well being part of the Corporate Office which manages the over 60 different companies under the corporate umbrella we are tasked with developing strategies to provide support to our associates, maintain and secure the domain, and provide the corporation with software solutions to manage all the different companies and there resources (see how this can get complicated very quickly?). After almost 7 years here I still am not familiar with all the programs we support or all of the companies we own, and the list keeps growing. (As I type this the radio is playing AC/DC Highway to Hell)

Ok now for the low down on our IT (Information Technology) division.
When I first started here IT had about 50 employees, most of which were programmers for the proprietary software that had been developed to support the different companies. Core Services the group I am in had 18 Associates. Well now we are in the middle of an Oracle Implementation and IT now has over 80 employees. Yep you guessed it Core Services now has 12 Associates.

Let’s forget all the programmers and consultants for now and stick with Core Services which if you haven’t guessed yet we are responsible for keeping everything up and running, secure, and trouble free. The CIO (Chief Information Officer) has been here for all of 6 months. As for the rest of Core services the manager is 2 months old and only 4 of us in Core Services have been here more than a year.

Now for the section I work in the Help Desk, in December we lost our manager who had over 25 years with the company. He was replaced but his replacement didn’t have much of a customer service rapport and he was relieved from managing the Help Desk (note they didn’t fire him for his lack of skills) which has 4 analysts (5 when I first started) well they made the senior member of our team the new manager (and they could not have made a better choice), however that took us down to 3 analyst. Well last week one of the remaining 3 analysts resigned to go sell real estate. Ok now we are down to 2 one of which hasn’t even been here a year yet and has very little training in the way we do things around here. And unfortunately we don’t often see eye to eye.

Well it is the beginning of the new fiscal year and everyone is buying their new PCs and Laptops. Right now in my office I have 7 new laptops to configure, 3 re-works, and 1 with more viruses then a lab rat. That doesn’t include answering the phones (I have 2 lines), e-mails, service requests, and all the people who tend to just drop by. Yipee!

Oh and the systems that have been in place for quite some time now are failing at a rate that is scaring the hell out of the few of us who really understand the impact there failure.
I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job!

Anyway that is why I haven’t been around as much lately and why I’m so cranky when I am here.
Jeez it took me 2 days just to get this post typed up.

Sunny I say we ride rain or shine!