Today’s award for “Mistake Made With the Best of Intentions” goes to whoever toggled the “load images for originating website only” option in Firefox on our sports station’s control room computer.

Have you ever seen ESPN’s site with no graphics whatsoever? I have. It’s sort of amusing, and a fair bit of useless as well. Were I more of a diehard webhead I’d go off on a usability rant, here, but luckily for you I can’t be bothered. Besides, you can’t swing a dead cat on the Web… actually, you just can’t swing a dead cat on the Web. Sure, you could make a Flash file or something that depicts the act of swinging a dead cat, but it’s just not the same thing.

Not, mind you, that I’ve ever swung a dead cat. I’m just saying.

Where was I? Oh, yes, rants about usability and accessibility are a dime a dozen, which should be making somebody a fair stack of money. Too bad that the “somebody” in question isn’t Me. Such is life.

Anyway, maybe I should install Adblock on that computer, since what I suspect the culprit intended was to stop having to look at all the damned advertisements…

There are some things I occasionally lose track of in my idealistic fervor. For instance:

• Managers get flatscreen monitors and their own color printers simply because they want them. Common sense and solid business reasons have nothing to do with it.
• Computers are allocated by snap decisions of middle managers. “Resource limitations,” “sensible priorities” and “budgetary constraints” are just so many meaningless phrases.
• Appreciation is best expressed, after an overworked and underpaid lackey has just moved heaven and earth to accomodate your poorly-conceived whims, by a simple “Thanks, I really appreciate it” and not, say, in crisp clean bills of reasonable denomination.
• The people doing the bulk of the work should under no circumstances have the gadgetry necessary to do so. Gadgetry is too valuable of a status symbol to be wasted in that fashion.
• Kiting off for the day less than five minutes after you’ve called your computer tech over to your office for support is a perfectly reasonable practice. It’s not like he’d need you to actually demonstrate the problem in question when he arrives, after all.
• And last but most assuredly not least, nothing is ever up for discussion. Being decisive means flattening all opposing viewpoints. This is, after all, a zero-sum game we’re playing.

I love my job. I even like most of the people I work with. I hate, however, the general corporate mindset. I hate it a whole lot.

I know I’ve had an overwhelming day when I sit here at 5:00 realizing that I did almost nothing that I actually set out to do today. Sure, I replaced that one hard drive, but the computer swap? The new file-transfer website? The new intranet site? The monitor replacement that I promised a sales manager a week ago? The monthly checklist? Nope, didn’t get anywhere near any of that.

A visiting salesguy from Marketron asked me this afternoon how large of a staff I have to run seven radio stations’ worth of computer equipment. I just laughed, and laughed, and laughed…

Sure, I ran around in headless-chicken mode for most of the day, frustrated as all get-out, short-tempered and multitasking like a six-armed three-headed cyberbeast…

…but I got to do some mad server-fu towards day’s end. I love actually getting to do hostmaster tinkering. Yay!

Note to the gods: This is not an invitation to give me another day like today, tomorrow. Okay? Thanks.

When you can’t make one particular computer connect to the network… when you have to deal, yet again, with a recurring arcane problem that tends to fix itself once enough random things have been pressed or jiggled… when the powers that be keep coming to you for answers that you don’t have about why things aren’t quite right… when projects keep piling up and you keep not having hours in the day or spare sets of hands or eyes to deal with them… you wonder why you love the job so much after all.

Then again, someone dangled a rather nifty carrot in front of me today. I hope something actually comes of it…

“Karel, our printer’s doing something weird.”

Oh, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that in my eight years here. Luckily, the guy who came to my door in this instance is one of those who isn’t prone to panicking over trivialities, so I dutifully followed him over to his workspace.

Hmm. The printer was spitting out solid black sheets of paper, edge to edge and top to bottom. I unplugged the print server and the printer itself to stem the black tide, and made an intuitive leap that the toner cartridge might have been damaged in some fashion.

While I was unplugging things, I noticed a nearly-empty coffee cup, with a lipstick stain on the rim, next to the printer. I frowned a bit at this, but paid it no more mind.

The obvious solution appeared to be, “replace the toner cart.” So I popped open the case, briefly noted the coffee stain on the inside of the chassis, frowned again, and reached for the cartridge.

Now, you don’t ordinarily reach into a printer and expect to pull away a wet hand, but that’s precisely what happened. Yes, folks, somebody managed to spill coffee deep inside the machine, enough to form puddles on the toner cart, and that’s why it’s incapable of printing correctly.

Gee. I wonder if this has anything to do with that lipstick-smeared nearly-empty cup of coffee. What do you think?