Secret Diary of Sidney Sharepoint (Part 3)

It was Friday lunch-time and with most of Pottersgate Paints down the pub Sidney was busy googling trying to find out about ‘managing information’. He had been invited to join them down the pub by the MD’s nephew Peter, but was instead glad to get some time alone in the office. It had been a very difficult week with Peter Pottersgate criticising most things that Sidney did. He had complained that the Administrator account was still called ‘Administrator’, he had complained that the version of Office was only 2003 and had criticised Sidney’s style of trousers. The annoying nephew had also by-passed the Corporate Firewall so he could get to YouTube, disabled his virus checker and downloaded four films in full causing the company Internet connection to grind to a halt.

Sidney now had just two weeks to come up with a proposal for the Board of how he could better organise the company’s mound of information. He hadn’t really got very far, but under Peter Pottersgate’s guidance had started using Social Networking to get to talk to other IT Managers. He had joined Facebook, started to Twitter and was now Linked-in. Sid was quite impressed that he now had nearly twenty Facebook friends even if only two lived in England and several had names he wasn’t sure how you pronounced them. He had even been contacted by a woman who claimed she went to school with him at Perry Barr High. He really couldn’t place her but thought best not to say. So on all these sites Sidney asked for everyone’s advice on ‘Information Storage’. The replies back ranged from the far too technical to the offer of a one-to-one session priced at £400 with ‘Luscious Lips Linda’. But at least he was getting to interact with real people.

Sidney was trying to complete the far too complex Excel Expense Form that Fred Farthing, from Finance, had designed. All Sidney was trying to do was reclaim his rail fare from his trip to London last week. Once completed the form had to then be signed by his Line Manager, witnessed by somebody who wasn’t in his department and countersigned by a director. All this usually took up to three weeks to achieve by which time it was either lost in the internal mail or the monthly Expenses BACs run had been missed. Perhaps there was a more efficient way of doing this. After writing the amount in the wrong box Sidney gave in and decided to just forget about the train ticket. Instead he decided it was a good time to go through the pile of mail in his In-Tray. Actually the incoming mail also filled his Out-tray and his Pending one too. Much of it was junk mail and Sidney managed to fill all three bins in the IT Office with it without the need to open any of it. As usual his ‘Computer Weekly’ remained in it’s polythene wrapper although like many IT Managers he did have a quick read of the Dilbert cartoon strip on the back and thought to himself, “how true”. It was as he was trying to find room in one of the bins for the ‘Computer weekly’ that he noticed the article just above Dilbert trying to put out a Server Room fire. It caught Sidney’s eye because it mentioned the launch of SharePoint 2010. This rang a bell because one of his new Twitter chums had said they were attending the launch of this ???when??. Sidney was going to read more about it and even ripped a hole in the polythene so he could do so when a new email message arrived on his computer.

Sidney was excited to see the email in his Inbox was from Hannah Harper. Now, after Hannah’s last email left him in no doubt that she never wanted to see him again after he had stood her up he was somewhat surprised that he was now reading a very severe telling off from her for the fact that he hadn’t emailed her all week. She was obviously still very cross with him and again the last line emphasised the fact that she never wanted to see him again. Sidney had never really managed to get to understand the working of the female mind. He was unsure whether a reply was required or not. The end of the message clearly suggested not but the start was complaining about him not being in touch. Sidney decided that he needed to write a grovelling apology as he really wanted another chance to see Hannah Harper. Just as Sidney was typing the email Ken Klondike came loudly in the room.

“Six days. Six bloody days I have been without my email”, Ken Klondike was not happy. Sid looked somewhat confused.

“Did you log a helpdesk call Ken?”

“I rang last Friday but nobody has bothered to come and fix it”, Ken was fuming and Sid tried to recall being told about this. “I want it fixed today”, Ken banged dramatically on Sid’s desk (well Colin’s desk) and then stormed out. Sidney was left to frantically check through his emails to see if he had missed something. He remembered Colin’s fondness for post-it notes and quickly scanned through the twenty or so around his desk. None of them mentioned Ken Klondike’s email. But then he noticed the one saying ‘Buy Hamster Food’ had something written on the back. Sidney turned over the slightly greasy yellow post-it and saw the words ‘KEN EMAIL BROKEN URGENT’. They really needed a better IT Helpdesk system. At that point Sidney’s PC flashed up a message saying that updates had been applied and it was restarting. It was asking him if he wanted to send the open message so Sidney clicked ‘Yes’. Unfortunately all Sidney had written in the message to Hannah was “Hi Hannah, I know I have been ignoring you so I will just...”

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”.