Technological Voodoo

Technological Voodoo... It is what managers demand IT Guy's to Perform.
Between when some upper management type has a advertising inspired dream to feather his nest and pad his resume and the finished product  is where the Technological Voodoo is performed. I will give you an example:

Manager: I want an Ipad that I can do everything on...the same as my windows desktop.
IT Guy: Umm, that is not possible the Ipad has limited capabilities and does not run all of the App's that a PC does.
Manager: I saw an Ad that said I could be 22% more productive in more places by switching to an Ipad and I think that the Ad knows more than you do because it is on TV.
IT Guy: Ok I will look into it.

This is where the Technological Voodoo begins, First you sacrifice a goat to your Pagan God...wait...wait.
Actually what happens here is boring and time consuming so a brief breakdown of what occurs is:

working out what App's the manager uses 8 hours (10 mins of real work 7h 50 mins of trying to get coherent information out of the manager)
10 hours of trying to make Apple IOS play nice with exchange.
7 hours of getting all the various document types said manger wants to use (who the fuck uses publisher now days)
6 hours of getting the VPN client to play nice with IOS.
and just when you have it ready and useable...
30 hours of training and user support in the first month of use as the manager has never used a touch device or IOS before.

The real Technological Voodoo is the chemical reaction in your brain that stops you from beating them to death with said Ipad, 61 hours of your life wasted on a product that is used a total of 15 hours before the user moves on to the next shiny object spouting advertising drivel as if it was gospel truth.

Now there is a funny saying...Gospel Truth...think about it for a minute if the gospel is the truth then what about every other religious text ever written? What if one day we find out that the buddhists had it right or the Hindus? That would make it the gospel lie now wouldn't it. I find it increasingly amusing the extent to which getting into "heaven" requires you to have "unshakeable faith" At what point does the rational mind turn off and stop questioning something written 2000+ years ago? translated several times into several languages and interpreted by people and delivered as sermons around the world on any given sunday?
If someone was to give you a book on humans being able to fly and the caveat of it was that in order to fly you had to have "unshakeable faith" to be able to achieve it would you :

a) Jump off a cliff
b) Spread the word about it
c) Call Bullshit and throw it away

Part of me is Kid on christmas excited to see what happens at the end because the possibility of it just being nothing is as good a chance as anything else.


Back to the Technological Voodoo... Alot of what happens behind the curtain in IT is not mystical or magical it is hard work, research, diagnosis and years of experience. Much like doctors in the middle ages we are seen as performing acts of the mystical and magical, A lot of the stuff IT Guy's perform is mundane and repetitive to us and is as magical as the old coin behind the ear trick...Amazing to someone who has never seen it before but obvious to anyone who has paid attention and seen it done before.

None of this is to be confused with Technological Ninjary...the act of making problems disappear in a puff of smoke (still working on making managers disappear in a puff of smoke) We have all kinds of names for things we do in IT to make it seem more awesome than what it is because in essence most people have a hard time following and not dying of boredom when we explain the details of exactly what must be done to get the requested result.

I know I did not present anything from my childhood this blog so here it is...When I was a kid I was helping my Dad in his computer shop building some machines and installing windows 3.11, To break the monotony and to answer a long standing internal question I decided to install windows to a different location just to see what happens...I learnt 3 things that day:

1. You can install it wherever you like just don't expect anything else to know where you installed it.
2. Dad will teach you a great lesson on why you follow a procedure...and make you install the OS on the machine 10 times in a row so you don't get any stupid Ideas in your head.
3. There are no stupid questions just stupid people.