The Big Scary World of New Technology And You

The long dreaded day eventually comes when the program or the machine(s) the office has been using for the past ten to thirty years finally give up the ghost and is either so outdated that it just isn’t safe/worth using anymore, or it’s just straight up broken. Now something new needs to be found to replace it. in the best case scenario, this was foreseen and prepared for. worst case, nobody saw this coming and now the whole office is in a pickle because the server is crashing about once a week, the IT guy is working massive amounts of overtime and the Government is doing a shutdown so now all the people that were staffed at Government locations are now back at HQ and twiddling their thumbs while we sit in the dark and pray the server starts back up again. If this seems oddly specific, it’s because this more or less happened exactly like that during my second interview. 

We really needed to upgrade things at the office. Luckily there was no problem with change as far as the employees were concerned. The problem was how much time it was going to take to back up and install all the new hardware for the new server. Upgrades were happening piece by piece. First we upgraded the network which was painless actually, no problems there. next we began phasing out all of the old workstations. I salvaged any stations not currently in use that could make the jump to win10 and upgraded them. Next, I junked as many of the old monitors as I could. I save a few of the old square ones just for emergencies and trust me, they’ve come in handy more than a few times. Next the stations that couldn’t run win10 were all upgraded to win7 and left in abandoned cubicles for use by interns on content migration and other such tasks. We were short on machines at the time. next, I junked all the remaining machines that either didn’t work (lightning strike ruined a fair amount a while back) or were just way too old. I think win98 was the oldest I found. A year later, we got new monitors, a month after that we got new machines for all active cubes and replaced the win7 machines with their old ones. It was after this that the server started going funky. We worked hard to keep it going until we could replace it, customers and employees alike depended on it. think of it like a heroic last stand, holding the heavy stone door up while your companions escape and only letting it fall after everyone else gets out. Eventually a new server was installed and all the data was recovered from our backups. Everything was just business as usual but slightly faster. 

This is probably a bad example of adapting to new tech but this was relatively recent and came to mind first. The reason the transition was relatively easy was because at work, we were all technologically inclined and all wanted the changes to happen. The server was an exception but we didn’t have much of a choice and it happened out of the blue on us. We also had three of the best IT people I know working both day and night to fix and maintain it. When I first came to school here I didn’t know how to work a computer really. I didn’t have internet at home and I was scared of the big changes that were happening. Only recently have I come out of that shell and started to branch out. It can be hard to learn new tech without somebody holding your hand when you aren’t familiar with any kind of tech.