[Tfug] TUSD Tech Nightmare

[George Cohn]

Bexley Hall wrote:
>
> I don't believe the problem is confined to schools
> (both "secondary" and university, etc.).  I've rarely
> encountered a *business* that spent its IT dollars
> wisely.  For me, the test is:  "If this was MY
> money, is this how I would spend it?"
> 

I worked for a non-profit corporation for over 32 years.  During that 
time frame, I saw them buy some really stupid hardware.

Remember the IBM micro-channel?  They bought a semi-load of PS 40's, 
60's, and 80's back then.  The guy brought them in a semi and dumped the 
pallets on the sidewalk outside an unsecured building and left.

I had to call security to come unlock the building so we could move them 
inside before they grew legs.  As it was, nearly 40 ended up unaccounted 
for and we never knew whether we had never received them or they were 
"borrowed".

Then there were all the Compaq Evo's that they bought.  What a POS. 
Then they started buying the cheapest Dell's they could find.

And the politics was unreal.  We needed a server for a network 
application and because the manager hated our group, he took the machine 
we bought for his desktop and gave us his desktop machine to use as the 
server!  We never could use the application as the machine was just too 
bloody underpowered for it.

Finally they outsourced the IT department to a vendor that does 
military-industrial accounts and it just got weirder.  Since they 
weren't making any money on the account, they just kept cutting staff 
and not replacing hardware.  It got to the point that they sent all the 
spares back to use in other accounts and if someone had a broken 
machine, it had to wait for the parts to come in to fix it.

At that point, I bailed out.

George Cohn