Back in September 2005, I wrote about IT's Hidden Truth-that everything is too expensive and nothing really works. At the time I was focused mainly on hardware and software. Six months later I feel like I have a better grasp on costs but stumbled across another aspect of the pain of IT: Telco service providers are proficient at best, and grossly incompetent at worst. Most are somewhere in between.
A few examples just from this past week:
- Our existing internet provider accidentally sent a kill order for our circuits, forcing us to reroute through our VoIP phone switch and setup a VPN to the VoIP switch (not pretty) resulting in nearly 2 days of vendor provided downtime. This was because we are using the same bank of IPs in our new office. Meanwhile, I was at OSBC sweating it out while the genius from SBC wandered around our basement looking for circuit IDs.
- Despite five weeks of warning our existing telco provider didn't tell us that they weren't going to release our phone numbers until 2 days prior to the move. Only when we called the CEO of all three companies involved in the phone circuits did we finally get the numbers released...several days late.
- In another bizarre twist, we can't call from our existing office to our new office phone numbers. Still unresolved but has something to do with DIDs not being registered with the provider which makes no sense.
When I spoke at OSBC this week, I stated that marketing is more fun than IT. While I was joking at the time, I think that I might be right and that I should consider going to back to the darkside. I can't really figure out if doing marketing is any less annoying or painful than IT is, but I am leaning toward the fact that marketing is at least a different type of stress, one not based on the monotony of telecom and servers. On the other hand, there is something satisfying about making things work. That's an aspect of IT work that keeps many of us coming back.
Comments are welcome. I can't be the only one who wonders about this.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 17, 2006 07:16 PM
