Somedays It Isn't That Bad

So of course as I type this, the day is bad, but the week has been pretty good. I figure most of you have felt like I do, no one understands what we do and when we fix an issue they don't truly appreciate what it took to fix it. I equate this to why most IT people are very cynical and it always makes we laugh when end users don't understand that. But every once in awhile, you solve that one issue and help that one person that leads you to think maybe it was worth all the time, effort, etc.

First issue resolved was one that the developers at my place had been working on for days. They wrote a program, that would execute read through a ton of data and then do something with it. I'm not a developer so their explanation was way over my head, I could follow, but not much more. Once they confirmed the program was executing properly and performing the job correctly they began to schedule a task on the server to do it automatically every day. Then the issue pops up, they can manually run the executable, but if the schedule task tries it starts the program and does nothing. No log file is generated saying what it did. It just so happens I set these servers up and they thought perhaps I could lend a hand. Initially my thinking was that it was a permissions issue. So set to run with highest privileges and used an admin account. No dice. Next I thought perhaps I could run a batch script to call the executable. No dice. Things weren't looking too good at this point. They decided they could just login and execute it everyday at 2 PM. So after playing with things, I recalled that I once had an issue where a batch script wouldn't execute properly on a server due to relative paths being used. I explained it to them and it just so happens they used relative paths. While I searched for other solutions, they came back to say with an absolute path it was working without issue! Many thanks came my way and it was a nice feeling.

Second issue wasn't as glamorous, but was one of the few times a business end user has thanked me. We have a remote user who an ineffective IT Manager decided that having her remote in from her PC at home to a PC in the office was the best way for her to work. She had been doing it that way for two years. We had carpet reinstalled and we had to take her PC down during the install. She called everyone in a panic since she couldn't get in and of course everyone comes to us, "what's going on here?" So I said to my boss, why don't we just give her a laptop and call it a day. He agrees and we begin setting the laptop up. A week later a request comes from her manager to give her a laptop (talk about foresight?). She comes in the office and we hand it to her, give her a brief walk through and off to the races. I get an email the next day from her just glowing about how much better this setup is and how thankful she was for it.

So while it sucks in the trenches, know that maybe (just maybe) someone out there does notice the effort we all put in.