frustrations w/ corporate IT

I just got off the phone with the IT people for my company. We recently merged, and they are trying to move all the web sites/applications onto their servers from our own. It seems that they don't have any(!?!) server side functioning (no php, asp, fp extensions, etc).
So I now have to write in detail what the forms on my webpages do, so they can try to make workarounds with the corporate web design app thingie. Is it just me, or does this seem like they are going out of their way to make things difficult and re-invent the wheel?
Anyone else have good stories of the guys at headquarters making their lives difficult? (misery loves company )
</end frustrated posting>

Jip, you are right. Misery does indeed love company . You have my sympathy. I think all IT people are out to get everyone

I got a new PC at work bcs I was complaining that mine is to slow and doesn't have enough memory (every time I run a macro I get a memory error, or my computer just stops responding).

Ok, so they asked me what I need on the PC (after taking my old one away). I (naturally) told them that I need microsoft sql, vb and homesite (and all of the other goodies developers need).

This is where the prob comes in. Apperantly I have to get permission from the CEO of the company 2 get SQL and VB installed (they signed a contract with Microsoft giving them only 13 licenses (for a company with 300+ employees). Any additional lisenses gets charged another redicilous amount)

The CEO says it isn't his problem (understandably, he's a very busy guy), the IT people say they won't install it without permission (in writing) from him.

And the fact that I have already lost more money sitting around doing nothing than the lisences would have costs, doesn't seem to make a difference either.

Makes you wonder.... (basically why they hired me, but I won't point that out )

// me shrugs

Don't write the justification and they'll either:

1) Never move your stuff.
2) Move your stuff anyway and break it.

If they choose #1, just let all your calls go to voice mail (or, if you can ID them on your phone [I can ID callers], just ignore their calls) and set up a rule in your e-mail client to move all of their e-mails to the trash. Problem solved (unless they can physically approach you, in which case you're out of luck unless you have a locking office door.

If they choose #2, take the opportunity to run around screaming about how THEY broke the site and it worked fine when YOU were running the show. Point out that YOU didn't want to do the move and now thanks to THEM you're all screwed. If you can, give the illusion that you're working long hours to fix the issue by leaving your PC on and logged in, a light on, and a jacket on your chair, etc. With any luck, your boss will think you're leaving after him/her and coming in before.

You'll either get fired or promoted for taking one of these two plans of actions... I'd say you have an equal shot at each

I've taken the attitude that anytime someone "important" in IT makes a decision, I'm about to become a very unhappy employee. The last two "upgrades" have been nothing but nightmares. The first, an "upgrade" from Office 97 to XP left me with 3 totally useless templates that had previously allowed me to be extremely productive at a few routing tasks (I've since passed those tasks off to an assistant who's job has actually become picking up the slack left in the wake of these idiotic moves). The next "upgrade", from a WinNT to a Win2K server (meaning we also went from IIS4 to IIS5) caused me nearly 30 hours of unpaid overtime as the result of a bug we discovered in the FP2K2 server extensions. Other countless problems (defined as "stupid Windows things") kept cropping up to (like, if you rename a page somewhere so people's shortcuts can't get to it anymore, Windoze "helpfully" (and silently) redirects all of them so they still work. Not cool, because the idea was to flush out the people who hadn't updated their shortcuts like we told them to. They kept going to the old page on the old server and submitting data, but, of course, the submission was failing silently in ASP and we didn't notice until a week later when people started whining that we were "ignoring" their requests..... uuurrggghhhh.

The great part though is, I don't blame the people who actually had to DO the switches at all. For the most part, they feel the same way I do. It's the suited imbeciles that don't have to actually do any of the work or deal with the consequences that make these decisions so they can justify their utterly pointless positions... ugh.