Making the decision to become a human resources (HR) consultant and leave the constraints of permanent employment was the best thing I’ve ever done.
I couldn’t have predicted, however, that IT would become the bane of my life.
I thought I’d spend most of my time visiting and meeting managers and advising clients. Instead, I find that I’m wasting entire days on the phone to various IT advisers in an attempt to access mye-mails from different computers and work out printer settings. I couldn’t have imagined the frustration of trying to sort out the most basic of daily tasks, like saving a different version of a document, or updating a spreadsheet.
At the last company I worked at, for example, I spent about three hours trying to access various subfolders, rather than writing up the report that was due in later that day. As a result, I had to cancel my plans for that evening and finish off the report at home.
But what really irritates me is the fact that no-one ever takes responsibility for the problem, even though you’ve been booked in to work there for weeks. When I accept new work now, I specifically ask the client to set me up with a log-in and make sure I have access to the relevant files the week before I go in.
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Do they ever listen? Never.
No matter how well run or dynamic the organisation might appear from the outside, the IT problems always seem to be the same.
