Stupid Consultants #1

Why is it that whenever we have consultants in the building they expect me to fix their company laptops? Why is it my job to set aside pre-scheduled work to baby sit clueless consultants and their ridiculous little issues? Let’s set the record straight, officially, it’s not my job to fix other company laptops, at least according to my manager and his manager. It’s all well and good saying that but putting it into practice is another story entirely. You see, I can ignore these consultant-types or I can tell them I can’t attend to them, but that’s not going to stop them from continually nagging me to death to fix their issue, we even had one consultant ask a random manager to tell me to fix his laptop so that there would be some pressure for me to put some kind of urgency on his request. Unreal.

Take this gem for instance, we had a consultant that flew in from Ontario to do work that the company doesn’t trust it’s own employees to do. He was designated a private office for a few weeks but on the very first day he tracks me down in the IT dept and lays down a sob story about having problems getting onto the internet, note how users do this to you, they never tell you what the real problem actually is, they want to lull you into a false sense of security before carpet bombing you with 500 other requests. (See this article which breaks it down further: http://fuzzylogick.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/tricksy-users/). Anyway I knew that something big was up by the way the guy nervously twitched his right eye when he spoke to me.

So one arduous trip and three hallway hijackings later I arrive at this guys office, I sit down at the laptop which he had brought in from Ontario, it was a craptacular Toshiba. He tells me it’s running XP and right from the get-go I notice that this laptop has issues because the network adapter is not flashing it’s green and orange LED’s when the Cat5 cable is plugged in and I know the cable is working and patched correctly in the server room. Below the keyboard near the hand rest is a Windows Vista sticker, I’m curious about this so I turn the laptop over and notice it has a Vista product key affixed to the bottom. So, why on earth is it running XP I wonder to myself. I ask the consultant and after putting his words through an idiot-to-normal translator he blurbs out something that resembles this; “My IT guy at my company says that Vista isn’t very good so he put the XP on it” (Note the ‘the XP‘ right there, what a gem! This tells me quite a lot about him, it means he probably failed English in high school even though it’s obviously he’s native language, it also tells me he knows nothing about objective personal pronouns). I say; “…okaaaaay…”. and then touch a key, bringing the laptop out of standby mode.

This is where things start to get really interesting. Right off the bat I notice his display resolution is not right, it’s a 16:10 aspect widescreen display running a 4:3 aspect ratio resolution, this makes things look stretched and squished, the second thing I notice is that it would appear he isn’t running with the native drivers for his video card, instead it’s using the default XP driver which provides zero hardware acceleration so when menus fade in and out you can visually see the animation stuttering every couple nanoseconds.

I click around a bit and then open up the almighty device manager and I am instantly stunned because before my own two non-twitching eyes lies a horrific, putrid wasteland of missing device drivers, a veritable silicon armageddon of nothingness, I gulp and count 8 yellow exclamation marks. Everything from display driver, network interface, to multimedia audio controller, no drivers were installed, nothing, this would explain why he can’t get onto the internet. I mean DUH! Just then thing’s take a turn for the worst, out of the corner of my eyes I see a notification bubble popping up from the right-hand corner of the taskbar. It’s a message prompting the user to activate windows and that he has 3 days left to do this. I sit in awe and astonishment, words escape me.

Let’s recap quickly, here we have a consultant flown in from Ontario with a Toshiba laptop with ‘the XP’ loaded on it because his IT guy told him that Vista is not good, the laptop has no drivers on it and now it wants me to activate windows. What is wrong with this picture? More importantly what is wrong with his IT guy at his company?! Do they not double-check these things? How can you load XP onto a laptop and forget to install all the drivers? Did that little tid-bit escape the IT guy as he was sipping on his Tims while satisfying a donut? (For my international readers, Tim Hortons is a famous fast-food and beverage vendor in Canada).

I compose myself mentally and ask the consultant the inevitable question, “Why has this laptop got no drivers and why is it wanting to activate?”. The unbelievable escapes his mouth, “Well, it’s a pirate copy of XP”. I am floored. So let me get this straight, you want to take time out of my day to use one of my corporate XP licenses to illegitimately install it onto your craptacular piece of hardware, then spend time finding drivers, downloading them, installing them, making sure that they work and then inadvertently making myself available to you for all kinds of tech support requests because I was the guy who fixed it. I don’t think so buddy. There’s obviously something wrong here. I question him further and discover that his IT guy isn’t a fulltime IT guy, he’s just an ‘on the side kind of IT guy’.

The human race fails…again.