IT Drones: Vent your current frustrations at work here!

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I think it helps to vent every once in a while, and having a sympathetic audience helps.

As for me, my company has to be held over a fire to spend any money on IT. I'm a contractor, not a full-time employee, so I don't work overtime like the others because the company won't pay for it.

Our equipment is severely outdated for the most part, and many of the functions of IT have been centralized at the corporate office. None of the policies make any sense. I got talked to because I had brought in my personal computer on my personal cell phone connection to get some stuff done in my downtime. Even though I'm a systems administrator, they were worried about a 'foreign' computer on the corporate intranet...

My boss isn't very helpful. I'll call with a question of problem and his response is to "make it work." To make matters worse, he dismisses most of the solutions I present.

My coworker, who is working on a deployment project and the reason I got the job, couldn't be any more vague when describing processes and procedures. I have to ask repeatedly to get a coherent answer out of him, and that's when I can find him.

Our mobile IT equipment is under less security than the office supplies.

That's just the worst of it. It's a long list.

Today marks 12 years on the job for me. Not that my boss noticed... I mean not like head office sends a reminder to each manager 6 weeks in advance that includes a link to add a reminder to your outlook calendar. Oh wait they do...

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised she missed the other 11... Funny she made a big deal of the last person in my department who hit 10 years (all before they transferred into IT) and she was only in the department for a month or two...

I'm also the only senior department member to not win a quarterly award. I got beat out by the better looking athletic guy who works only an hour or two a day then blogs about MMA and fishing the rest of the time.

Too bad I suck at job interviews...

I think this is the 3rd negative thread I've seen about IT. Is that kind of work so bad? I was actually thinking about learning IT at a community college near here. Now I'm not so sure.

It's not that bad The expectations from the non-IT part of the business can be tough to put up with though. In most offices where everyone spends so much time having to be nice and professional to customers, they like to de-stress by using IT as a punch-bag. It's really not that bad, in a lot of places IT do get a lot of slack compared to the grunts and if you've a strong interest in computers, you'll actually enjoy the work

Jason.

Yep, been there done that. I finally realized that even though my concerns were totally legit my boss simply never wanted to be bothered. So instead of asking my boss if I can do this or that or what he thought about things I started implementing my ideas on my own and bouncing ideas off other people who were more receptive. This started out as an act of rebellion on my part and I expected my boss to get angry about it at some point, but as time went on I discovered this was what he wanted me to do all along. Some bosses want to manage you, others want you to manage yourself. Sounds like your boss is the latter type. Congratulations. I have found that "Making it work" myself is very empowering. It gives me confidence and has earned me loads of respect from my peers. Many folks now bypass my boss completely and come to me for solutions. All I have to do is send my boss an occasional email to keep him up to speed so he's never in the dark, and we're both happy as can be.

24/7 365 that is my complaint. I work at a tech oriented company, and we have an "on call" rotation for outward facing people. But as The systems Administrator / network Admin I get no rotation I get on call constantly. I missed a call for something minor yesterday, and I got reamed out by my manager this morning for being out of contact. I have to wonder why the technical staff gets 100% on call while nontechnical people get one weekend every 3 months. I'm fine being on call, my boss is understanding that I have to take sleeping pills to sleep and can not be on location for 6-8 hours after I have taken them. But sometimes on a weekend I just don't want to have to answer a phone call from someone with a complaint. Truthfully I never want to answer a phone call but that's a somewhat different issue.
Anyone else have issues in tech with unrealistic on-call expectations?