Another sensational week in the office, which on reflection can be summed up by looking at the extent of technological problems we seem to face. And as it's my job to 'sort them out', I get involved with them all! However, looking at each in the cold light of day, are these bugs really all they appear to be? Is the tech in fact more trouble than it's worth (as some say)? Let's look at these issues from a Luddite point of view - are these all problems caused by the presence of technology? And could we work better without it?
* The instant messaging system suddenly gave up working sometime last week. It's not essential to work, but it's nice to have (I can tell when people are logged in to their PCs, great to know when you're trying to talk to people some hundred miles away). I reported the fault, however after a week or so the IT team are still investigating the problem. They say it might be a hardware fault, it might be software. It could I suppose be someone unplugging something they shouldn't - but I guess they'd never tell me if this was the reason. :)
* There was the problems we had with the letters produced by the company's computer system. One particular type of letter stopped working at all, immediately following an upgrade to the system. Is this truly the computer's fault, or the fault of the programmer who worked on the upgrade? In fact, this turned out to be the programmer - although the client was said to be at fault for not testing the release properly! (****!)
* And then there was the fact that all the phones suddenly stopped ringing one afternoon. Quiet, I grant you. Too quiet. The problem was traced to the 0845 provider, whose network went down unexpectedly. I'm told this was definitely a hardware failure. We got the phones back pretty quickly, thankfully.
Out of three examples, we have one failure of the technology, one failure of the programmer, and one where the court is still out. Do you know what I think? I think that on average it'll work out that more than half the time the problem is due to people - although you can bet that in most cases the computers will be blamed.
Could we work better without tech? If we did, we'd need far more people to do the work - with all the consequent cost repercussions, i.e., training, health & safety, holiday and sickness cover. Remember, it was to reduce such reliance on personnel (and improve productivity) that employers chose to automate, leading to the Luddite riots - see top of this blog.
"People are a problem." - Douglas Adams
* The instant messaging system suddenly gave up working sometime last week. It's not essential to work, but it's nice to have (I can tell when people are logged in to their PCs, great to know when you're trying to talk to people some hundred miles away). I reported the fault, however after a week or so the IT team are still investigating the problem. They say it might be a hardware fault, it might be software. It could I suppose be someone unplugging something they shouldn't - but I guess they'd never tell me if this was the reason. :)
* There was the problems we had with the letters produced by the company's computer system. One particular type of letter stopped working at all, immediately following an upgrade to the system. Is this truly the computer's fault, or the fault of the programmer who worked on the upgrade? In fact, this turned out to be the programmer - although the client was said to be at fault for not testing the release properly! (****!)
* And then there was the fact that all the phones suddenly stopped ringing one afternoon. Quiet, I grant you. Too quiet. The problem was traced to the 0845 provider, whose network went down unexpectedly. I'm told this was definitely a hardware failure. We got the phones back pretty quickly, thankfully.
Out of three examples, we have one failure of the technology, one failure of the programmer, and one where the court is still out. Do you know what I think? I think that on average it'll work out that more than half the time the problem is due to people - although you can bet that in most cases the computers will be blamed.
Could we work better without tech? If we did, we'd need far more people to do the work - with all the consequent cost repercussions, i.e., training, health & safety, holiday and sickness cover. Remember, it was to reduce such reliance on personnel (and improve productivity) that employers chose to automate, leading to the Luddite riots - see top of this blog.
"People are a problem." - Douglas Adams
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