Almost made the IT guy cry

My office, in acknowledgment that we work differently these days, is shrinking our physical office space. Back in the day, this meant office folks being downgraded to the cube farm, but it means something else these days. Today (Friday), in our office of about 120 people, perhaps 40 or 50 people will be physically in the office. The rest will be telecommuting or vacationing. Physical attendance is a little better during the rest of the week, but almost all of us telecommute at least once a week, sometimes more. This has led to the office looking quite deserted many days so, in an effort to make the office seem more populated, and not to mention save money on rent and utilities, my office is reducing our office space. For some this has meant going from an office to a cube, for others this has meant office sharing. I fall in the later category.

This is not as bad as it seems. I have a laptop and telecommute several times a week. My office mate also telecommutes several times a week, but still has a desktop at work. This is not a major hassle as we usually are not in on the same days and we have a virtual private network (VPN) to log in on home. For me, with the laptop, I use my VPN token on the laptop from my home and start typing away. For my co-worker, she leaves her pc on at work and uses a virtual desktop from home which allows to be almost at work from home, at least electronically (the downside of this is her desktop at work takes up limited desk space). Through a careful dance around school and camp schedules, we've reached an equilibrium where we both have our own office on certain days of the week. The only days we have scheduling problems are days we're both in for our bi-monthly department meetings. Again, not a major hassle as laptops travel. However, since I'm the only one with a laptop, currently, I'm the traveling man. We have extra spaces, either hotel cubes for visitors or offices of people on vacation who currently have laptops that I can plug my machine into. At the moment, this is limited to a small, but growing percentage of office space as people in my position get converted from desktop machines to laptops. Yesterday was my office mate's turn.

My office mate is, admittedly, not the most tech savy person. Yesterday, when I walked into our shared office to file some paperwork (I'm still waiting for the truly virtual office) I saw the IT guy at her desktop, preparing her computer to be copied to her new laptop. The IT guy is a 40 something, friendly outgoing guy. You know the type, a hard worker who is also quick with a joke. His mental presence usually outshines his physical presence. Anyway, my co-worker was asking him how she would connect at home. You see, currently at home she has her home computer and uses that to log onto the system. The nice folks from FIOS hooked up her machine, she connected to the internet (and our network) and that was that.

So, in an effort to help her out, the IT guy first asked her what equipment she had at home. A thin, shiny black box. Oh a modem? No, they called it something else. A cable box? No, something else. Oh well, well you're going to need a router. A router, that's it! Well, the laptops have WiFi capability. Is the router wireless? I don't know. Can you connect with an ethernet cable. What's that?

At that point, I left my office. I didn't actually see the IT guy cry, but he sure looked deflated. Maybe he was just tired as he has been rewiring and remapping many employees for the last month as we downsized our space. Maybe he was just having a bad afternoon. Anyway, as I reached back to close the door, I looked back and saw the back of the seemingly shrunken IT guy. Though he didn't say it verbally, I saw him slowly shaking his head as his whole body seemed to let out one long "sigh." As I left, I got the feeling this wasn't the first time this happened to him. As for my co-worker, next week should be quite interesting.