Management Toolkit

Story: Music players 'cause trouble' for IT helpdesks

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Most clients I worked for had a ban on all personal peripherals long before MP3 players started cropping up.

Bringing a MP3 player to work is fine, listening to it is fine - assuming the employer allows the playing of music in the workplace - but attaching it to company property, aka a PC, would have been construed as a breach of IT policy, and probably employment T&C's, and would in all likelyhood lead to disciplinary action.

On the other side, getting help from the helpdesk wasn't always easy, but we weren't allowed to do it our selves (and the lockdown on the Windows configuration options usually meant it was impossible). The biggest farce was 'phoning the helpdesk, getting somebody to come down to sort out the problem, who had no idea how to fix it!

The conversation would go something like:
Me: "Can you please enable X"
Tech: "Errm, I don't know how."
Me: "OK, log in as Administrator, double click this icon, good, now click here, yep, and then there. You need to change the value there to 1 and then save."
Tech: "Was that all?"
Me: "Yes, thanks."

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