Printer problems.

[Kal]

At work yesterday afternoon, the team's printer broke. This normally wouldn't be much of an issue as the in-house IT team would either fix it within the hour or swap it out for a replacement if the repairs were going to take longer. Sadly we no longer have an in-house IT team as it was apparently cheaper to have one near London (bit of a trek to Blackpool really).
At 2:30 the printer broke, leaving ten people unable to print anything bar word documents. From the error message, a pick motor has broken, which I reported and figured that since it left us unable to produce pension quotes, this would be urgent. More than a day later and all we know is that they're looking into getting a replacement part, although "sometime early next week" is the best that they could tell us.
Today was therefore spent badmouthing the management and IT teams and looking at the huge pile of backlog piling up on us.

[Kal]

Ok, the printer broke at half two on Thursday. From this point on, no one in my team could do any work at all. It's stayed broken through Friday and now Monday and the best estimate to its repair we can get is "Later this week when we've got a quote for the part".
Now the section manager's involved in getting it fixed, and is still getting the runaround.

[Geek King]

Sounds like someone didn't write up the contracts to include response time. Perhaps management shouldn't trust vital components of your business to outside companies who are not overly affected by it, hey?

--Internal IT guy

[Raveni]

So, do you practice darts outside the manager's office, or do you somehow try to look busy?

[Kal]

We've been told "Do what you can". Which is basically spend ten minutes typing up a bunch of letters for the day then printing them out and sticking them in a file. The actual quotes can't be done so the rest of the day is currently being spent updating procedure notes. It's very dull in itself but does make for an ideal excuse for spending the entire day sat around chatting.

[Kal]

Finally they brought a replacement printer in, at ten to four in the afternoon. The guy hooked it up, turned it on, and it broke... Instantly dead in the water.
When I left he had it in pieces on the desk trying to work out why it wasn't working. Apparently they didn't bother testing the replacement before installing it and just assumed it was in working order.
I'd imagine it'll be fixed by tomorrow morning but that was just the perfect final touch.

[Daskinor]

External IT contractors are the biggest waste of money ever if you have any semblance of a modern IT environment at work.

Around here you can get a T1 or a T2 It tech for about oh 65k a year. That is 40 hours a week. Or for 50k you can get a rent an IT admin for 8 hours a week. and that's a REALLY good deal. Most of the time they will remote in, but these people will come in to manually fix things when necessary. But if its not a remote in, 5 minute fix. You will wait up to a day. Especially if your tech is already on site with a different client. Now if for some reason the crap hits the fan, you will be paying out the ass. Most of these guys are 80-140 dollars and hour.

Move on to the cheaper ones. The IT support is all remote, so its slow. The person you are dealing with know nothing about your company so its even slower. And 9/10 times they will need to ship you something so it's even slower.

[Kal]

Hmm, I'd say if you're able to print at all, it might not be a pick motor. Unless you have different paper loaded into different drawers? It definitely sounds that way to me, assuming that the quotes have to go on a different paper size or stock than the letters.

Didn't explain it too well, the letters could be printed off on a different printer but there's no way to redirect the pension app itself to a new printer if one breaks.

They're looking into getting a new in-house IT team later this year but it's just a matter of hoping nothing else breaks until then.

[protege]

Didn't explain it too well, the letters could be printed off on a different printer but there's no way to redirect the pension app itself to a new printer if one breaks.

Ah. I wasn't sure until you mentioned that

That's a bit of stupidity in itself then. We had something like that where I work. Years ago, when I'd process an order, a copy would print out on an old dot matrix printer downstairs. The way that system was designed, we couldn't direct things to one of the big laser printers if the dot matrix POS failed. That system, was on a totally different 'node' of the network...which wasn't connected to anything, other than the T1 line which went to our main office in NYC. Stupid, but since it wasn't our processing system, not really much I could do about it.

When things did fail, it was usually a few days until it could be repaired. Meaning, when things were fixed, you'd end up with about an hour of listening to that stupid printer spewing out several days' worth of orders as it cleaned out the queue. Good thing nobody actually worked in that room...