The Department of no information

You get insights into how dire other peoples IT support at their work place is and you can help but to compare it to your own experiences.

A prime example is the Victorian Government's department of Education and whatever-it-is-this-week. They seem to have gone lowest cost on everything other than the things that matter, like support.

To give you an idea, here is an interaction my wife has had recently. Nothing to dramatic, just the ole "I forgot my email password"

This should literally be a 30 second interaction at most organisations. Her interaction with departmental support has been going on for over a week. Basically she hasn't had to log into email since the start of the year because of lock down.

She then contacted the department's IT support via their email system, which told her "nothing to do with us, you need to contact your business manager"

So you contact the business manager at the school she is at, the business manager has no idea about tech support she is just got enough power to reset a password.

The business manager resets the password, you try again, you fail, you experience despair.

You contact the business manager again, can you reset the password. sure they say.

Try again, doesn't work. repeat, try again, doesn't work.

My wife then asks the business manager and idea why the password you keep resetting doesn't work. "oh it could be, because the temporary password expires after a certain period"

My wife "do you know how long that is?"

Business manager "no"

Reset, try again, experience more despair.

So I have a look at the email that gets generated for the temporary password. The department in their cunning deviousness have made it a multi part problem. You have to use the temporary password, that may expire in a period of time nobody knows to log into another system called edupass, which I'm assuming from the stupid name is a Single sign on password system. Once you manage to log into edupass then you can set your actual password in order to log into the final destination of edumail (or O365 to everybody else)

So we try logging in to the 3rd of the trilogy, edupay, as the business manager is fairly certain they can log into edupay with the temporary password. So my wife and I try and we can as well, hoorah!.

Then we try logging into edupass with the same credentials on the misguided understanding the the department would be using some sort of grand unified password system. But no!, they seem to be using some system designed by the dark forces. So that is a no to logging into edupass with the same user details as work with edupay.

What if it's the username that's the problem we pondered. As the department used to use the teacher number as the user ID to log into their pay system, and the email address to log into the email. But the department recently moved email addresses from exchange to O365.

By this time we have managed to talk to the schools "IT support" person, I use the " " mockingly as indented.

IT support " So you could have been moved to the new system"

Us " How would we know?"

IT support " oh, they would have emailed you"

Us "but if you cant access your email, how are you supposed to know if you were moved"

IT support "silence....."

I could feel a physical shrug of the shoulders over the phone line at this point

Us "can you tell us if the email address was moved?"

IT support "no, don't have access"

Us "can we try logging in with the temporary password to them edumail?

IT support "you could"

Us "if we try too many times would that lock us out of edupay"

IT support "yeah probably"

IT support "I can log a ticket"

He proffered optimistically

IT support "but they take forever"

OMG, I'm not surprised with the stellar level of technical support i'm getting here 'Dave-o' in O365 support must be run off his feet.

Dear department,

Please please please, stop paying peanuts and expecting to get NASA graduates as technical support people. Peoples livelihoods and sanity and husbands sanity depend on them being able to have a simple transaction with technical support that doesn't end in attempted murder.

Actually have a centralised IT support desk that has actual people that can talk to actual human beings. Obfuscating it to the school admin person who has NFI about IT is lazy and a cop out.

Actually communicate with your staff is some other god dam form than email. Have a blog or some other form of information system.

thank you .

And you still haven't managed to change a bloody password after a week.