Secret Diary of Sidney Sharepoint (Part 1)

It was now nearly half past ten on a Thursday night and while most of the employees of Pottersgate Paints were at ‘The Flipping Frog’ public house, toasting the retirement of Edgar Edmonds from the Research Department, Sidney was stuck in the very loud Server Room. He was urgently trying to free up space on the Exchange Mail Server after it had ground to a halt six hours ago. It hadn’t been helped by the fact that the MD Percy Pottersgate had sent an email out to all the Management Team with a 4Mb attachment in. This was made considerably worse when most of the Management Team decided to forward the email to the whole of their department.

Sidney had long since given up on the idea of joining the rest of the staff at ‘The Flipping Frog’ despite his desire to actually talk to Hannah Harper from Accounts. IT Manager Sidney had first noticed Miss Harper when he ran an Advanced Excel training course last year. He ran eight three hour sessions and it was during the third one when this petite dark haired lady caught his eye. She had a smile that really did belong on a coffee advert. Sidney tried everything to get to talk to Hannah Harper after that session including deliberately disabling her domain account so she had to ring the Helpdesk. In the end the pair had started a little flirty emailing conversation, but the problem was Hannah had no idea who Sidney was (although perhaps that was a good thing) as he didn’t make an impression on the Training Course and IT were not people you generally saw. The IT Office was at the far corner of the manufacturing site and for most of the employees ‘IT’ were just the people who got the blame for most things. If the Internet was slow, documents lost or printers running low on toner; it was the fault of IT. Despite this, in the last few days Sidney had exchanged enough emails with Hannah that she was quite excited about them both going to Edgar Edmonds leaving do. But being IT Manager meant being on-call 24 hours a day and not being entitled to a social life.

Finally, at ten to one, Sidney had freed up enough space, although maybe he had been a little premature in deleting Edgar Edmonds’ mailbox even if it did free up 4Gb. Now he would just restart the Exchange Server ‘Cornelius’ and then he could drive home and maybe get a few hours sleep before his 6am alarm. After what seemed an eternity ‘Cornelius’ restarted but then a quick look at the Event Log could see red error after red error. Sid was tempted to just ignore them, but he knew they wouldn’t go away. They were errors all saying, ‘unable to connect to backup device on Taylor’. The previous IT Manager, Charlie Caton, had been a fan of ‘The Planet of the Apes’ films so he had named all the servers after characters from the films. Now they had nearly thirty servers, finding new characters had been quite a challenge. Sidney knew the importance of a successful backup so knew he had to resolve these errors. It seemed quite likely that Sidney would not be going home tonight. If only there was some way of letting his dogs, ‘Max’ and ‘Freeway’ know.

Friday morning saw a rough looking Sidney summoned by the MD’s PA, Gwen Gardner, to see the MD himself, Percy Pottersgate. Sidney like many other employees at Pottersgate Paints was scared of Gwen. She believed that as the Managing Director’s PA that she ran the company and even when she wasn’t smoking her cigars she was an intimidating sight in her pinstriped suits. She always reminded Sidney of the Spitting Image version of Margaret Thatcher, but Sid thought it best to keep this private. Sidney waited patiently outside Gwen Gardner’s door knowing that like a Headmaster with a naughty pupil she would keep him waiting even though she knew he was there. Sally Staff, from Personnel walked by and complimented Sid on his designer stubble. Sidney didn’t bother to explain it was due to his all-nighter or that he was actually not named Charlie.

Sidney stood in front of Percy Pottersgate’s great ornamental desk not knowing quite why he was there.

“These network drives are a shambles”, said the MD, “I have spent the last fifteen minutes trying to find where I put last year’s golf pairings”.

Percy Pottersgate did not look up at Sidney once. “Information is vital to the running of Pottersgate Paints. I want to be able to find what I want straight away”, Mr Pottersgate was clearly not impressed.

Sidney enquired what the name of the file was, or when it was created, but the MD just shook his head and said, “You are the IT boffin not me, how am I supposed to know the names of all my files”.

Sidney tried to offer his assistance but could tell he was on to a loser especially as he remembered the last time he had tried to help that the MD had got fourteen separate mapped network drives.

“Look there is a Board Meeting in three weeks time and I want you to give me a detailed cost effective proposal by then of how you can sort out this shambles”, barked out Percy Pottersgate.

Sidney went to leave the room totally perplexed at how he was going to solve this information mess, but Percy stopped him. “Don’t forget Peter starts with you on Monday”, the MD said.

This was news to Sidney and he asked who Peter was.

“My nephew, of course, Peter Pottersgate, he’s halfway through a Computer degree thingy at College and I said he could work with you for three months. Didn’t I tell you?” Percy Pottersgate finally looked up at Sidney, “Give me a chance to find out what you IT guys really spend all day doing”.