Am I supposed to be writing for this Blog?

Am I supposed to be writing for this Blog?

No excuses, no explanation, suffice to say that I’m back now after an extended leave.

What’s bothering me today, the new IT department’s policies concerning administrator rights to my computer. Oops did I say ‘my computer’, I meant the computer that I’m attached to 9-1/2 hours a day five days a week.

A little background information is in order here. We all have shiny new workstations here at Byers. They are built to the hilt Dell machines with 4 GB RAM, fast SATA 2 drives and a mid-level Quadro video card. All this is connected to a ‘real’ Dell server with all the bells and whistles. During the install process I was given the administrator password so that I could get all the CAD/CAM software up and running on the machines in the engineering department. This involved fresh installs of SolidWorks and any other programs that we use in performing our jobs.

Everything was up and running and we were productive again and then I realized that I had forgotten to enable duplex printing on the OkiData printer. When I went to fix this problem I was informed by the computer that I must be logged in as the administrator. I then found out the password for this account had been changed and there was no way this information was going to be given to me.

I understand that there are users on our network who have no business with administrator rights. We’ve been down that road before, virus, malware and spyware being installed at the user’s spontaneous desire to click something in their web browser. But I’ve been an integral part of the migration to technology here. When I first started working here the company had recently acquired their first Numeric Control Punching machine. The programs had to be typed into a machine that punched a paper tape that was loaded into the machine controller. There was no CAD/CAM then. As one of the sheet metal mechanics on the shop floor it was my responsibility to manually draft out sketches of the parts in the flat so that the programmer could write the code on a yellow legal pad which was handed to one of the secretaries so that she could type the code into the paper punch tape machine.

When we finally did get our Applicon Bravo CAD/CAM system I was the one who of 3 persons who went through the training and the only one who actually caught on to the system. Not only did I do all the CAD work back then but I was also responsible for the system maintenance. The system was running VMS on Digital Equipment hardware. VMS makes all flavors of windows look like a piece of cake. I even wrote several programs in DCL (Digital Control Language) that managed the tasks of backups, restores and even file renaming of the DXF files to the 8.3 format which was needed by the machine controls.

I’m saying all this just to say that I really feel as if I’ve been ‘dumbed’ down. Heck, I can’t even delete unused icons on my desktop now! Forget about checking for new SolidWorks releases…I must be an administrator.

Yes, there was a problem here at Byers. There was unlicensed software floating around. The system we had for backing up our precious data was crap! People here were installing everything from NASCAR race day to Print Shop 1.0 with no control and no concern as to what was happening to the actual programs that were needed to perform their jobs. But to blanket all persons with the same restrictions is actually counterproductive to the persons who know how to do their job and how to adapt their computers to do it better and faster.

But if this is company policy then I will live with it. I will continue to do my job to the best of my ability with the equipment and software available to me. Will I be happy about it? I don’t think so…all these icons on my desktop are really bugging me!

Am I being a jerk about this? Let me know what you think. Are any of you trying to work under the same conditions? Let’s get some comments going!