12/7/13

madrobins: It's a meatloaf.  Dressed up like a bunny.  (citibit)
About four months ago my company's on-site IT guy left to join his wife (who was living in another city).  Our tech needs are complex, since we not only have to be able to do what we have to do (that means Macs and Mac OS for the editorial, marketing, and art departments, of which I am one, and PCs and Windows for the financial and sales folk).  Our e-mail is handled through our parent company's servers and network (parent company is in New York.  We are in San Francisco.  Cue the merriment).  The last IT guy set things up in ways that made considerable sense to him and not so much sense to the IT department in NY.  Most of the time all this stuff happens below my technological radar; yesterday it blew up.

Microsoft Office told me repeatedly that the network wanted permission to use the MS settings of a colleague who left last month.  I kept saying No, thank you.  I said it as politely as the "Deny" button would let me do so. Finally, Outlook stopped talking to me altogether.  I sighed and called in the new IT guy.

24 hours later, the new IT guy and I got to know each other very well, bonding over our abject inability to get Word (and later the network) to recognize me.  New IT guy reinstalled the Office Suite two or three times.  Office was happy to recognize my settings for Word and Excel (for a while, anyway).  But Outlook insisted, over and over and over again, that I was not an authentic user.

New IT guy and the entire massed splendor of the NY IT office discussed and discussed and remoted in and tried repeatedly to figure out what had happened.  Their only conclusion: my path is corrupt.  All my data must be backed off, and the entire system rebuilt.  On Monday.  I hope the entire of the IT team has a relaxing weekend.  They have earned it.