In working off-site at the moment in a huge company and it feels like I'm in prision.
Took them 5 hours to get past all the required sign offs to just get me an internet connection. Everyone on XP and ie8 on century old laptops.. everyone sat in the staff canteen looking miserable ...
UGH!
That sounds similar to the experience a colleague had - he was chaperoned everywhere because there wasn't time to arrange the right pass for him. He wasn't allowed to go to the toilets or for lunch on his own.
Off-site or on-site though? I refer to it as going on-site, because I'm going to the site where the stuff I'm building is actually used.
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.