A long time ago...
I took a job in a financial house in Dublin. Day one, I remember the overly smiley boss walk me into a room that had no windows, where three incredibly stressed-out helpdesk staff were on the ceaselessly ringing telephones. After 20 minutes of waiting to get a chance to introduce myself, I found myself picking up the 4th telephone and saying, "...er, good morning, you're through to the helpdesk" and getting an earful from the other end. The next 3 hours (I'm not kidding) were spent picking up the phone, writing down details, hanging up the phone which immediately rang, and repeating the process. By lunch time I had a nice little list of 'things to do'. Thus began, what was to be, a daily occurance.
I found within about a week, that they were imaging their NT workstations using some weird archaic software. They only had three types of PC hardware, but around nine NT builds, none of which had been updated in over a year. All had huge problems, like failed software installations, hard-coded WINS entries and 'previous' user profiles. Complete mess. I remember building one and realising that several apps didn't work. "Oh, that must be the Market Data build. Yeah, you're better off using the Valuations build and installing EDW on it."
Solution: Create one NT Workstation build with ALL software perfectly installed and configured. Install ALL disk controller & network card drivers, enabling them only in certain 'hardware profiles' (remember them?). The result was an image that worked on all PCs in any department (only breaking one or two licenses). I burned a bootable imaging CD and made four copies. "Every problem you get, no matter how small, use this CD." A few months later, you could hear a pin drop in that office.
Feedback from overly smiley boss: "I'm failing you in this performance review. You've been coming in late."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
