Work update

Three of my coworkers (or their wives) are now expecting babies. That's 10% of my office will be having babies within the next nine months. And the woman next to me said something along the lines of "And I think there will be more." in a way that made me feel that she knows something I don't.

A few months ago my firm did away with in-house IT support. Brilliant! Now when we have a problem we simply call the "help desk," which is neither helpful nor a desk. It is group of very friendly Indians in Mumbai who are happy to use every courteous remark that has ever been coined in the English language. They are quick with my ticket number (in the case that I need to call back later) and the suggestion that I restart my computer.

Last week, two of the office computers broke. One due to a juice spill and the other just because laptops are finicky. We have an extra "loaner" computer, however, it took a day for the "Help Desk" to figure out how to get it working. Then it took another two days for another loaner to make its way to our office from Chicago. This is not because the loaner laptop walked to Milwaukee - it just took that long for the "Help Desk" to realize that they cannot fix the broken computers over the phone. One of the guys affected bills his time at $390 / hour. He spent four days trying to get a computer. Missing eight hours of work each day cost the firm $12,480. That's incredible. Maybe I don't understand the cost-effectiveness because I'm not a partner.

Today we had another mishap concerning our computers. The office network was "down" - probably due to not enough memory. I learned today that our main drive only has 19 gigabytes of memory. That's crazy. We decided, during the four hours it took the "Help Desk" to fix the problem, that we would all open gmail accounts and begin saving our work there.