Every age has a group of people upon whom all of life's little problems can be heaped. In the 70s it was the traffic warden, the 80s saw the estate agent elevated to the dizzy heights of the stⁿrmbahnfⁿhrer of hatred. But the 90s has easily surpassed both the previous decade's attempts, bringing us the exquisite torture that can only be the systems department.
To picture what sort of person seems to make the ideal systems staff member you have to imagine a cross between the archetypal mad scientist and the half-man-half-beast character that the villagers know exist but can never find when they need one. Then again, why imagine, when you've probably got one just like that in your systems department?
It's not that they are deliberately awkward, unhelpful and clueless about the workings of a computer, it's more to do with the world-weary 'it's not my fault' face that so many of them seem to adopt. On the face of it they are friendly and polite, taking care not to insult or embarrass, but underneath they are a seething mass of discontent just waiting to boil over, on whoever has the misfortune to report a network fault or a printer jam.
And boil over they do. Rather than fix the computer on site, their favoured approach is to tut-tut a lot and say it's going to have to go downstairs so that they can re-configure it and do lots of really difficult stuff that they haven't got the time to tell you about, even if you could understand it anyway. What this really means however is that they are going to take the computer downstairs, chuck it in the corner of the room and spike your effigy every time you phone to enquire how it's going.
To make things worse when they do eventually bring the abused and frightened machine back to your desk, it refuses to work properly and they insist on buying expensive and unnecessary parts to repair the afflicted device. Naturally none of these costly repairs work, and the machine will continue to malfunction until an outside contractor is despatched to blow the miserable thing up because there are some 'serious i/o and memory problems'.
This then results in numerous calls to the support desk and the inevitable trip downstairs to confront them head on. This journey, which makes the fiery torment of Beelzebub look like an old folks' outing, inevitably ends in tears and some serious back-tracking by the Keystone cop-like rabble, all of whom clearly have the brains of a rocking horse.
When you do get your forlorn machine back, some bumbling blob will haul their lardy arse into your office, tinker around with it and then expect you to be grateful that so much time and effort has been put in on your behalf.
But it's not really all their fault. I've met some pretty obnoxious users over the years and as more and more people start to mess about with computers there are more and more users who think they know what the problem is, whereas what they in fact know could comfortably fit in the part of the brain programmers use for storing their charisma.
But what the systems professional doesn't realise is that these people actually use the PC and therefore have quite a good idea about how it is malfunctioning. Imagine if doctors took the same approach. They would herd you into their office and without so much as a 'what seems to be the trouble then' pull your trousers down and have their hand up your bottom before you've had the chance to ask for a repeat prescription.
So what should be done about it? I suggest you call systems or you could just go into the systems department with your trousers down and see what happens?