Let the mayhem begin!

Fuck me. We're a week into the bloody year and it's absolute mayhem already.

I'm stuck between two very senior faculty who communicated poorly when working on a collaboration for a grant application. Now they're fighting over gets to be Principle Investigator (the boss position), and it has devolved to actually deleting each others names from the fucking budget on every iteration that goes round!

What the fuck?

And then another Faculty member came to my group asking for help with an NIH Training Grant. That's due in 2 fucking weeks!! TWO WEEKS! What the everlovingbuggeration?! She asked me if I could help her write it.

NO.

I will edit and do some basic project management for you, but I don't do education and I don't write bloody training grants. My name won't be on it and I won't get any money out of it. Sorry mate. No free lunches at The Ivory Tower Cafe.

Then, just now, one of our Very Senior Faculty, and Chair of one of the large clinical divisions called me in my office in a screaming panic that someone had stolen his data. he has a $40,000,000 (yes, that's 7 zeroes) clincial project and had been storing his data locally, in his office. Someone obviously pointed out that this is a Very Bad Idea and is why data get compromised and that folks like me exist to prevent this from happening by running centralised secure servers. Anyway, they moved his data to a remote server on campus and bob's yer uncle, it's gone.

He was about to call the fucking FBI when someone pointed out he should probably call me first. I called our IT department who found that a Windows Update had activated the local firewall and so his data was actually, theoretically, too secure!

Anyway. At least that was solved easily. I have a LOT of issues with our IT group. They provide a below zero level of support sometimes, and for certain issues (like now...the only Linux DBA is on vacation and so of course one of our Linux servers has gone down and no one can do anything. It took a week of emailing and calling to find out they couldn't do anything for the next week. What the fuck is that about eh?)

However, some of the guys there are fucking awesome and full of WIN. I wish e could get something unified going on. Between academic computing (essentially my operation) and Information Technology there need to be a very high level of support and, dammit, camraderie. We are all in this together, we serve the same fucking population, albeit from different perspectives. Why can't we get along?

It wasn't like this in other places I've worked, and it's making all of us look bad. I am getting fed up of receiving shitty emails and phone calls for things that IT should have taken care of. And I am fairly sure they could say the same thing.