Tag Archives: EdTech

My Year in IT: keeping a sense of humor

A post in the series My Year in IT

For me, working in IT has required a healthy sense of humor.

There is the easy, obvious humor that comes from working in an environment that is straight out of an Office episode.  That leads to silly shared memes, bad photoshopping of each other’s headshots, and the occasional inflatable monkey at my desk.  But what it really comes from is that in IT we are working in teams and not solo.

From my years doing historical research in the solitude of an archive, I’d become used to working through problems myself, and developed workflows for my personal productivity that rarely hinged on others.  My first few days at an IT cubicle were a completely different experience.  Paper planes whizzed over walls and news would spread across an entire hall of offices simply by having an audible conversation.  I soon learned how valuable that ‘spread’ of overheard conversations would be, as others in nearby cubes who heard me speak of a problem on the phone might soon pop in and add their two cents to the issue.  And among team members, it became apparent that humor is necessary to diffuse stress and to create strong working bonds with each other (or just to revel in the fact that it is Friday and almost the weekend!)

Humor also comes in handy when one realizes that a problem cannot be fixed.  There is a mantra in IT that “anything is possible with enough resources” and this is usually said in a preface to an explanation of why that desired thing is not possible.  It may be an unplanned system outage, the inability to modify out-of-the-box software, or the impossibility of churning out an immediate web programming change.  Grappling with finite resource limits is maddening, especially when one is aware of the frustration that users feel when something is not working as expected.  Enter, humor.  These moments are not the laugh-out-loud silliness of youtube mishaps, but are times when one has to smile and forge ahead to provide a workaround, or reach out and communicate as clearly as possible what the impact of the problem/outage/malfunction will be.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve needed to keep a sense of humor about myself.  Despite knowing all that I know about technology there are days that my printer isn’t working, times when I need a password reset, and moments when it feels like every click yields an error message.  It is then that I get most exhausted by the tangle of spaghetti powercords in my bag that seem to include every single one except the one that I need and it’s high time to start laughing instead of cursing.  Technology is frustrating even for those of us who spend all day mired in it (or perhaps even more so).

My Year in IT: On moving to a cubicle

This is the first post in a series about My Year in IT.

Last year I moved from my central campus office-with-a-window to a cubicle in our IT building.  In preparation for the move my academic books went into storage and I bought a fancy new pair of noise-canceling headphones (which were deemed a necessity for my new digs). The move was a willing change for me, as I had just accepted a one-year position managing the computing service team for our university.

My motivation for this move was driven by the disconnect that I see between academics and operations in HigherEd.  We are a house divided, with few people who navigate the gap. Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in IT, whose technical functions undergird teaching, faculty productivity, and campus communication.  Yet there is near-invisibility of the technicians who sit at their screens all day ensuring that when a professor walks into the classroom they can access the classroom projector, open Blackboard, and log into their storage drive to retrieve their powerpoint slides.

Given that our campuses incorporate cutting-edge digital tools and methods, the impact of IT on HigherEd is ever-expanding. Our libraries house digital repositories, our faculty each have an online presence, and even the campus gym is expected to have wireless.  Added to that are the data needs of campus support services, which are critical for hiring, enrolling, advising, coaching, and so forth.

Serving on the front lines of the campus IT department has given me a window into how all of the campus systems function and interact with each other (and also a view onto how difficult it can be when services don’t function).  I have a growing respect for my highly-skilled colleagues who offer technical support, fix AV, install routers, write programming scripts, manage projects, and implement technology policies.

From where I was sitting a few months ago, to where I sit now, the view could not be more different. Yet it is also very much the same–in both seats I am surrounded by people who work hard and who are passionate about their jobs.  On the academic side my colleagues focus on teaching students and excelling in research.  And in IT, they focus on providing timely and helpful service for clients.  Both are necessary.  Both keep the university humming along everyday.

And I might add that those noise-canceling headphones are now dusty from lack of use.  Instead of tuning out, I’ve been listening and learning constantly, which has reminded me why I got into academia in the first place–to better understand what’s happening around me.  And that is definitely not noise.