Not having a good morning.

Wanna know the fastest way to piss off a computer tech?  Answer: Mess with the network in some stupid way and when he comes in to ask you about it, tell him that HE must have messed something up.

We moved servers at work.  Our old one was just about out of space, so they moved us over to a new box.  Why they didn't just expand the old one or span it to a new drive array, I don't know.  But they decided that just copying everything over to a new server entirely and redoing people's profile settings to point to the new box would be better.

That's not all that uncommon, and while it's not a best-case-scenario, it's usually pretty straight forward.  Unless you make the changes to people's profiles at 9AM . . . an hour AFTER they've logged in to start working.  So all our files are gone from the old server, and none of us are mapped to the new server!  

Enter our admin: “Well, you probably didn't know what you were doing when you booted up today.  Restart and it will fix itself.”

Yeah, cause heaven knows that boot-up can be pretty tricky!  So I restart . . . no good.  I perform a gpupdate /force, and only then does it take the new settings (way to push the policy update there guys).  It asks me to restart, and I do.  My new proxy info is there, but my drive mappings are still pointing to the old server.  I ask my friend and coworker (and fellow forum member) welsdog to come over and take a look (he actually works in the IT department) and he's as confused as I am.

Take two with the admin: “Well, you probably screwed it up by manually mapping the drives.  You can't manually map it, it has to do it itself.”  I insist I never manually mapped the drives.  ”Yeah, you did and probably didn't know it.  Don't mess with your system!”

I go back to my system, disconnect from all the old drive mappings and logoff/login.  Sure enough, the new mappings are there . . . twice.  I have two mappings to the exact same directory on the network.  How this is supposed to help me, I don't know.  Fact of the matter is, I now know our admin didn't know he needed to use the “net use f: /d” command before he tried to remap us.

Last nail in the coffin:  I finally have the new drive mappings, I finally have access to my files again . . . except . . . no I don't.  They aren't there.  They aren't on the new server.  I check back, they aren't on the old server.  This genius thought it'd be a good idea if he also changed the directory structure, so now all the reports are scattered across the drive and have to be tracked back down!

Now, I know that I'm not working in the IT industry anymore, but I can't exactly just turn that part of my brain off.  When I walk into your office and tell you that my drive mapping is not being changed on my system even after I've forced a group policy update, you should probably notice that I've shown SOME grasp of understanding and you can't just “Well what did you break?” me away.

The other gripe isn't really anyone's fault: Google Chrome is very fast.  So fast that I get aggrivated with Firefox and IE when they take too long to load something.  That's fine at home, where I no longer have to use either of them, but at work we use Oracle and Oracle does not yet work on Chrome.  So I'm switching between my ultra fast browsing and my slower-than-Gump data entry.

Or the fact that he's been working there for 28 years.   At least he started with Windows 3.1 and was able to work his way up.