Down, But Not Out

Jesus, the shit just keeps coming, doesn't it? As if Google's determined attempts to kill my (and everyone else who isn't a 'brand') organic traffic isn't bad enough, this evening The Sleaze was down with an internal server error for at least half an hour. I suspect that site accessibility was being affected intermittently for at least an hour before that. To be fair, within fifteen minutes of reporting the problem, my web host had it all sorted and the site's back up and running smoothly. For sure, I was cursing them blackly whilst the site was down, but I can't complain about the response time.

It's all in marked contrast to the situation in my workplace, where it took two and a half weeks to get an entire IT support system to sort out a simple problem. Since moving into a different building, I've been unable to print anything - which is a pretty serious handicap, as it means I can't action a lot of my work, resulting in complaints. After being fed much bullshit, I finally got an engineer sent out yesterday. He agreed with me that it wasn't a hardware problem, and that the 'helpdesk' could have talked me through the problem over the phone. To cut a long story short, when we relocated, my profile had been set up incorrectly and my printing had been assigned to devices that no longer existed.

Of course, part of the problem lies with the fact that work's IT support has been out sourced to a private firm which has us locked into a very expensive support contract. It simply isn't in their interest to solve problems quickly. Consequently, their 'helpdesk' is incredibly unresponsive, often passing you from one operative to another, with no result. Nevertheless, even taking all of this into account, I still find it astounding that my web host can sort out a problem within fifteen minutes of receiving a support ticket, whereas I have my ability to do my job hobbled for over a fortnight due to my employers' (much more expensive) IT support contractors inability to sort out a simple printing problem on the phone.