One calendar week away from the unleashing of Hell — i.e., the beginning of the fall semester — and the university IT drones done fucked up majorly.
They blew out the e-mail accounts and admin gradebook privileges for almost all of the professors. They must have taken off and nuked the whole site from orbit.
No on-line access to class lists or classroom assignments.
No on-line access to book orders or book lists.
No on-line access to enter final Summer II grades.
To cap it all off, several department heads (including mine) are on vacation. (The department heads need to list off current faculty members, so that the tech weenies can re-invite/recreate faculty accounts.) Plus, half the tech support staff is on vacation, as well, so there are at most, four sweaty, harried AV and tech guys trying to do the job of ten.
In short, mass panic and hysteria has set in, and life on campus resembles the chasing of dozens of hopped-up chickens in a large, glass-strewn pen while blindfolded and drunk.
This…this may be the most epic beginning of semester hootenanny ever.
Why on earth did they not do this back in May or June? Even July!
Total incompetence.
By: The_Myth on 08/18/2008
at 11:30 PM
OMG, IT guys!
Earlier this summer, ours put through some command to EVERY campus Mac telling them all to clear out their hard drives. A few were spared, and most the IT guys were then able to recover the files, which are all given a random file name with no other identifying information, so that the owner has to go through FILE BY FILE and sort things out, rename, etc. Oops.
By: Bardiac on 08/19/2008
at 1:34 AM
Classes start Monday and I am about 95% ready.
The IT guys are still here and so far all is well. Now let’s pray it stays that way.
By: Rather Read on 08/19/2008
at 12:36 PM
Classes start next week for us, too. This is usually the week they decide to update BlackBoard, which will wipe out all our updates to dates and times assignments are available, etc. It happens every fall. Then the kids wonder why the classes aren’t available for them already, instead of Monday. I mean, the semester STARTS Monday, but shouldn’t they already have access to online classes? Can’t they have a copy of the syllabus now? AAAAGH.
By: profart on 08/19/2008
at 12:52 PM
hehehe- And you wonder why I went back to work for the Government??? I damn near got fired for telling the IT division director and CIO the were stupid for waiting until 1 week before classes to start updating the switches, routers and servers (took them 3 months to unscrew it)
IT geeks work to no calendar but their own, couldn’t care less about “critical” things like teachers acutally being able to do their jobs…
By: Old NFO on 08/19/2008
at 9:12 PM
Hah! The only person in our three campus system who understands our package of grading/attendance/discipline software just got back from vacation….. one week before school starts with about 2000 students rolling in.
NOTHING is rolled over. We can’t get a list of the students we will have in a week. They are not even sure if we have a paper list to take attendance with, let alone all the rest.
As for files…. they very carefully store our stuff in multiple network drives for security, and *I* very carefully attach my portable hard drive and back up all my own files every month or so. Not that I don’t trust the IT director not to step on his own di….
By: Carteach0 on 08/20/2008
at 1:31 AM
Carteach0- That is the ONLY way to do it… Anybody that really believes they can ‘recover’ everything in a timely fashion is smoking “something”…
By: Old NFO on 08/20/2008
at 11:47 PM
“…the chasing of dozens of hopped-up chickens in a large, glass-strewn pen while blindfolded and drunk.”
Why does that sound familiar? I sorta recall this night in ‘79 or was in ‘80? Hmmm…
By: Dan O on 08/21/2008
at 2:30 PM
What might one bring in a covered dish to the aforementioned hootenany?
By: Maven on 08/21/2008
at 6:08 PM
I do not have epithets strong enough.
I’m an IT person, but I happen to work in the “Real World” where this sort of thing would cost someone their job or have a serious impact on their career. This sort of thing is considered a “Resume Generating Experience” in my circles.
Now, I’m not saying that this sort of thing doesn’t happen, even to the best of us. But when it does, we figure out what went wrong, restore from backups, get things back to the way they were before, and then proceed more cautiously.
Reminds me of what happened when an IT manager from the local community college went out in the corporate workforce… it didn’t take long before his incompetence was uncovered.
By: Phillip on 08/24/2008
at 10:52 PM
[...] 18 August: It may be worse than that. The Cranky Prof puts the blame on her university’s IT types: They blew out the e-mail accounts and admin gradebook privileges for almost all of the professors. [...]
By: dustbury.com » In the forefront of technological advance on 10/16/2008
at 7:56 AM