Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Futon of the Computer World

When I worked in high-tech, the IT guys were special envoys from the gods who had magical powers. They climbed into the ceilings and snaked cable through cube walls to make amazing things happen on our computers. When they upgraded our systems, there was short inconvenience followed by increased performance and productivity.

Not so the government. They send us emails telling us mandatory "upgrades" will stealthily be put on our computers in the dark of night, and the result is "Your computer will take longer to startup and shutdown", and "CD/DVDs or USB drives inserted in your computer will no longer automatically start." To add insult to injury, our homepages on Internet Explorer wil be locked into the internal homepage, which opens at the speed of a tree sloth.

Why would any IT Department make these kinds of changes? "These updates are required to comply with recent government requirements to meet or exceed security controls for all governmnet agencies. " Oh.

No magical envoys are showing up to make my life better--but we will share a clumsy behemoth with a whole bunch of other government divisions. We're the "futon" of the computer world. (Merge a perfectly good couch and a perfectly good bed into a futon and what do you get? A mutant that is no good for sitting or sleeping.) Same principle here: merge a good computer system in one division and a good one from another division, and what do you get? A sloth of a system that doesn't work well for anyone!

Regulations trump efficiency every time. But who are we going to complain to? We are the government--we are the ones who write the regulations!

Yep, we're from the government, and we're here to help.


1 comment:

cindy said...

you forgot to write the "mwahahahaha!" at the end of that statement, "we're the govenment, we're here to help!"