I love it. I worked my last regular day for our IT
organization on December 23. I worked in Network Operations. We
do both the telephones and the network for the campus and there
are 3 hams in my group so we don't have a lot of that sort of
finger pointing right here but you would be totally amazed at
the amount of shot-gun finger pointing that goes on every time
something doesn't quite work right. It's always the network's
fault even though we can take them right to the bad stuff and
basically rub their noses in it and they stil think it is some
network Voodoo that we pulled on them just to make them
miserable.

	I was running our domain name server as well as our DHCP
server and I wish I had a Dollar, heck, a Dime would do for
every time I heard something like the following:

"Is DNS running okay?" My answer was usually that this was the
first time I heard of any trouble but I would check on it.

	I would check and, 999 times out of a thousand, it was
fine.

	DNS is a finger-pointer's dream come true because it is
a world-wide distributed data base meaning that nobody keeps it
all in a central repository. Oklahoma State University's DNS
keeps all the records for Oklahoma State University. Iowa
State's DNS does the same for Iowa State and North Korea's DNS
does all their DNS stuff and none of those systems are even
aware of all the others.

	When something goes wrong at Kansas State or
Microsoft.com, people on the Oklahoma State campus get the long
timeout or the "page not found" error so it kind of looks like
something must be wrong here and they ring my phone and I should
be able to turn off the Stupid switch, hit the magic clicky
button that puts us in smart mode and it all works again.

	I wish that was true. Also, if something is wrong at
some remote site, we get the call that goes, "We can resolve
this domain off campus but not on campus. When are you going to
fix it?"

	We tell them that we will find out what is happening.
When we start to dig, we find out that xyz.com blocks all
traffic from universities or maybe just ours because somebody
here did something nasty to them and they think blocking the
whole network fixes everything.

	If it's a good day, you get hold of somebody at the
remote site who A. knows what you are talking about and B. feels
compelled to fix it and everybody goes home happy.

	On a normal day, you can't seem to find anybody
responsible on the other end and then, one day, it all starts
working and you never know who did what.

	I always enjoyed solving mysteries, but I am not going
to miss the finger pointing one bit. It serves no constructive
purpose at all and is just wrong an amazing per cent of the
time.

	I admit to having done my share of finger pointing,
also, but as one gets older, you kind of get shy about it until
you have the smoking gun right before you and even then one
wonders if every stone has been turned.
"Dr. Ronald E. Milliman]\\\\`" writes:
> I can commiserate with Tom's situation. When I was still on the faculty at
> Western Kentucky University, at the beginning of every single semester,
> without exception, I would find out that the university's Information
> Technology people had been busy between semesters making changes to our
> computers, both in our offices and in our classrooms. I learned that I
> needed to go into my classrooms immediately before the semester officially
> started to check everything out, to see what the I T people had messed up