Million Dollar IT Guy

Everybody knows how indispensable the "IT guy" is at work.  IT can mean a lot of different things.  To the professionals in the field it might mean a network security analyst or a programmer.  To the average bureaucrat it means printer repair man, password helper, and even "guy who loads the paper in the copier."  

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite writers.  He is brief yet concise and somehow always manages to be entertaining.  Before all of his success writing books, he was just a writer for the New Yorker.  One of his best columns he wrote for the New Yorker was titled Million-Dollar Murray.  Basically, it tells the story of a homeless man in Reno.  Gladwell explains that between police and hospital coverage, society paid more than $1,000,000 to cover Murray's homelessness.  He did the math and realized it would be cheaper to hire a full-time social worker for the homeless man and to provide the him with a place to stay than it was to allow him to be homeless.  Homelessness, he declared, was cheaper to solve than to manage.  

So, where does the printer repair man IT expert fit in with Murray the homeless man?  

Well I overheard a co-worker who locked himself out of the network.  So of course the first person he goes to is our LAN expert.  Not surprising, the LAN guy couldn't help.  Although he is an "IT Guy," he was sadly, not the right kind.  But he did point him in the direction of the network help desk that assists with people who lock themselves out.  I listened to the co-worker and the network guy go back and forth for more than two hours trying to reset the password.  We'll call my co-worker Murray for this example.  I'm pretty sure this was not the first time he has locked himself out.  I'm pretty sure, because less than a week earlier, he did the exact same thing.  So Murray had easily spent about $300 of his own salary + another $300 of the network guy's time.  Considering he currently does this on a bi-weekly basis, I think it might be cheaper to hire a full-time employee to follow him around every day to make sure he doesn't forget his password!  He may not be a million-dollar Murray, but he is on his way!

Benefit of working for an idiot

There is a common misconception  that government jobs have more benefits than the average job. It is true that we have generous leave policies and a pension.  However we also are at the whim of elected officials who use us as pawns to make a point or curry favor with their constituents . One thing that we have in common with private sector jobs is that we all have to work for idiots once and a while.

The government can be behind the times when it comes to technology. Yes, the same bureaucracy that can develop stealth fighter jets and the Internet sometimes uses systems built in the 80s.  Teleworking has been popular in the private sector for a long time. The government is slowly adopting telework as a way to save money and increase retention. The problem with telework in the public sector...upper level managers don't comprehend it. 

A coworker of mine teleworks every Friday. I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty sure his tele"work" mostly consists of comparing the Kindle fire stick to the Roku stick.  But he is able to somehow get all of his work done despite the distractions.  However, at the end of each telework day, he is required to write a breakdown of what he did all day. Not an overview, a quarter hour detailed list of accomplishments. So each week he emails his manager at about 4:30pm and from 4:15-4:30 he writes "drafted email to you." When he checked his email last Monday his boss had replied to him and it said "I believe you're spending too much time on the email summaries each week." To which my friend simply replied "I agree." Luckily for him, he works for an idiot and she had no idea that he was making fun of her.