I about a month I leave my job here and move down to Exeter to work for the NHS. God only knows what it's going to be like there.

Dirty. Pack sanitisers.

 

And have you had all of your shots?

What're you going to be doing? I've worked with a few IT types who've had previous experience working for the NHS, and they always have interesting stories to tell.

 

My own favourite bit of corporate ickery was trying to get someone an additional gig of memory for their laptop to bring it up to the same spec as the rest of the team. The team consisted of people from both sides of a recently merged company, and she'd travelled from another site on the other side of the country to be part of the team. There followed a vast game of bureaucracytennis as various IT and business units attempted to deny all responsibility. We had to track down various managers of increasing seniority in order to get someone to sign off the expense, and when it was finally agreed, had to convince the local computing services dept that it made more sense if they obtained and installed the memory, rather than getting someone from the user's original site to install it. All in all, I reckon that it cost them a good few thousand pounds to install a £20 quid memory stick, when you add up the time that everyone involved spent on it.

 

Having installed the memory, we discovered that the main issue wasn't so much memory-related as IE6 related. Getting IE7 installed practically involved goat sacrifices.

I don't know. I've lost the bit of card that I had all my shots written down on.

I'll be working as a Network Engineer for Connecting For Health, the agency that's in charge of the national NHS IT program. Yes, the one that's already well overdue and over budget. On the plus side, though, I'll be near the beach this summer.

And, unfortunately, the NHS records system won't have that information either.

I used to work at Broomfield Hospital in IT support.

It was mostly dull, but it was interesting to see how taxes were spent. I remember two Doctors who hated each other trying to out-do each other on the "who's got the best PC" stakes. They must've spent £10K per year each on new systems and gear.

Around about the same price as a baby incubator or two IIRC. I remember mentioning this and was told that it was OK as it came from a different budget than the baby incubator budget. :-S

This was before standards of IT equipment were set. Upon recent visits (new baby and all that) it looks like they've gone the citrixy thin client route. I could tell, because they were all complaining about how bloody slow their machines were.