Warning - Rant ahead. Skip it if you don't want to know my latest frustrations
As you all proabably know - I work for the government. Normally the government is really good at long term planning (it takes a whole year to plan a twice yearly event, meaning you have to have 2 committees to get things done). Except of course when it comes to informing the people who actually have to do anything about it.
The government is also very good at delaying things until they become a problem then finding non-solutions to make it look like they did something.
Needless to say, I'm not a good government employee - I don't like either of these two situations. And yet, here I am dealing with them both in one day.
Here is one of the situations - One of the inpatient Psych units is having some major remodeling work done and needs to move all the clients out during the project (mentally ill patients and power tools are not a good combination). Someone much higher in the organization than I decided that Day Treatment would be a good place to house the inpatient unit while this construction is going on. I'm not sure when they decided this, but they told us about it a week ago - the project was scheduled to start today.
So all of last week we scrambled to move all of our stuff into half of our space. We sorted and stored and tossed and plotted out where our groups could meet and decided what projects we would have to live without and by Friday, we were out. Yea, they could clean and move in over the weekend and get that project started Monday morning and all would be back to normal in 3 weeks.
Monday morning happened and they hadn't even managed to tell housekeeping that they needed the rooms cleaned - But the patients should start moving down by 10:00 am.
11:00 am Housekeeping finally shows up to clean the rooms and they can finally start moving the beds down.
1:00 pm The head nurse "discovers" that we weren't kidding when we said that we were going to need to keep one of the locked store rooms because we didn't have enough space to store it and comes to me demanding that the stuff be sent to hospital storage.
First of all that's not my call to make and second I know that what was in that closet can't be sent to storage for a variety of reasons (like it probably won't come back). I tell him this and he asks for my manager - who just happens to be in a meeting with state officials about whether our program can be paid for my MA. She's not available I tell him, but here are the reasons that we can't move that stuff and list them all out.
Well he makes a big stink and I want to tell him "We're all squishing here, we're trying to put two units inot one space. That means we ALL have to squish." I hold my toungue for the moment. But still won't let him send the stuff to storage. I ask if there is a nother room that he can live without and we can put the stuff in there. No he needs them all and what is all this crap anyway. It's our Thereputic Recreation equipment (baseball gloves, charcoal for the grill, the grill, tennis raquests, etc). And what do you need it all for. I give up at that point and tell him that I can't let him send it down and he'll have to negotiate with my boss when she gets back from her meeting and go to my office.
Moments later the second situation arrises - our IT analyst knocks on my door and demands a list of porn sites that need to be blocked from our client computers.
A little background: For the last 2 years, I've been trying to manage our client computer room. It has not made it easy. Every so often I discover many porn programs and sites downloaded onto the machines and have to clean them off. I would really love to ban the person who downloads it from the computers, but I don't know who that is. A year and a half ago I asked Sweetie if there were any programs that would make my job easier and her researched and found five of them. I sent the list to our IT analyst and asked if we could please purchase one and listed all of the benefits to our program. She tried one on her desk computer and crashed it. She then sent me an e-mail stating that since the first one had crashed her computer, she wouldn't even look at the others and the idea was off the table. I tried many ways of trying to convince her to at least try one of the others, but she flatly refused. Finally I resorted to having my manager contact her manager. Hence the demand for the porn sites today.
I asked why she wanted to know which sites were on the computer. ."So that I can block them." she said. I was dumbfounded. She wanted to block site by site all the porn on the internet. I told her what a daunting task that would be and asked if there wasn't some better, one time solution that we could find. She lectured me about the delicate nature of the network. I agreed that any security holes should be plugged and asked again if there was some way that we could isolate our client computers from the network. She gave me the same lecture word for word.
I pointed out that her lecture wasn't answering my question and she started in again. I interupted with "That's not my question." and restated my question yet again and she started the same lecture yet again. This time I wasn't so polite. "Answer my question - can we isolate those computers, put them on a completely seperate network, or maybe give them dialup so that they don't touch the network?" Well you'll have to talk to my manager about that.
Fine I said, I would. But first I wanted to talk to sweetie and my own manager. Maybe with a little bit of creativity I'll be able to bypass that twit and get what our clients need. But in the meantime, I think that I'm going to go somewhere and scream...