Technical Difficulties

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I'll be the first to admit that I don't handle frustration well. While other people have learned to cope with frustration and frustrating situations like normal functioning adults, it is still something that seems beyond my grasp. I probably don't give myself enough credit, but I am just being honest with you. I am not above admitting my flaws. This all became very apparent to me in a situation that arose yesterday while I was at a client doing some IT work.

This all goes back a couple decades when I started doing some work on the side for a local municipality. They had an aging server and I got them all updated and running pretty smoothly. Over the years small issues would pop up and I would take care of them, but never anything consistent enough to bring in a significant income. It was the definition of a "side hustle".

Fast forward a few years, and due to the political nature of municipalities, there were some new faces at the town hall who had different ideas of how things should run. One of these new faces thought it would be a good idea to have their son mess around with the server. I heard all of this second hand, but he promptly bricked the server and left them scrambling to get it fixed. Meanwhile, before this I had been telling them for years it was time to upgrade their server again.

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I heard all of this second hand, but apparently they ended up hiring a different company to do a bunch of work for them which was basically all the stuff I had previously recommended to them. Fast forward to a few years ago and things have once again shaken up at the town hall, though a handful of people still remain. These people were always "fans" of mine, so when small IT things needed attention, they still reached out to me every now and then.

At first, @mrsbozz suggested I tell them to take a hike since they didn't want my help earlier, but I knew that was other players who drove that decision, not the remaining people who were left struggling. I hesitantly stepped back into the sometimes roll of IT support for them.

Fast forward a little more and we find ourselves at yesterday evening. They got a new computer and they needed it joined to the domain as well as a new user account created on the domain. Perfect, I can definitely help with that, I do it pretty much every day at my "real" job.

Only one problem, I don't have access to the domain server. That is still controlled by the third party IT company, and obviously they aren't too keen on giving those credentials (or that power) to someone besides themselves.

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Long story short, what could have been a ten minute job (billed at an hour minimum) turned into a three hour ordeal as I played phone tag with the IT company. It started out okay with us immediately getting in touch with someone who could get the computer joined to the domain. However, due to some other issues we had to call back and have a few other changes made. Unfortunately, the second time we got in touch with a level 1 person who said it would require an engineer to make the changes. I asked how long that would take and they simply said "they will call you when it is done". I wasn't a fan of that answer, so after sitting for about five minutes and contemplating the ridiculousness of the situation I called back and was able to get in touch with a different tech.

He fixed half my problem, but said he would have to wait on the rest. I asked him for the credentials to the server and told him I could do it myself in like two minutes. Suddenly, he was able to get ahold of someone who helped him accomplish what we needed immediately. While I do appreciate the amount of documentation they likely do on the back end to keep track of all the changes that were made, it just seems silly to me that they can't do simple tasks.

For example, I just needed a user account created, it's literally three clicks in Active Directory and you are done. This guy had to fill out a form and take all kinds of unnecessary information before he could complete the task. Again, I appreciate the attention to detail, but come on!

So yeah, I'll now be billing this client for 3+ hours of work versus the original 1 hour it could have been. I probably shouldn't complain too much because money is money right, but as I have said before, my time is more important than my money and frustratingly not having access to this server is a massive waste of my time!

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