First blood (or, more like that “Escalation” bit with Comm. Gordon in the end of Batman Begins, really)

War with IT department reaches dreaded new heights as every pre-emptive contingency defense plan I’ve come up with since last year is breached by the cunningly evil gremlins manning the servers at headquarters in one morning!
This is like adding the Israeli airstrike during the Six-Day War with Egypt to that pre-International, pos-Crisis Justice League comic in which Batman downs Guy Gardner with (and I quote) “one punch!”, it really is:

My backup system falls through as they subtly manage to reduce the allocation for the general customer service inboxes and cause the inboxes to virtually implode during the weekend. Just so as it gets harder to detect, each sub-inbox in the hierarchical e-mail structure is assigned both a different limit and quota. By the time we find out about the problem we’ve already lost one inbox out of five.
First blood goes to IT, and the carnage carries on…

And not only that, but the allocation for the personal inbox of each customer service attendant is cut down by half, also during the weekend, which ensues all-out chaos once heavy files such as Service Contracts are sent early Monday morning. As if it weren’t enough, when questioned by the Management, IT quickly deploys its equivalent of flare & chaff and misleads all accountability to my own one-man department.
It takes me about two hours to rid myself off the blame, but of course since my boss is friends with the big kahuna at IT, it’s left at that with no one the wiser.

Not content with the present ravaging, once lunch hour hits and I’m stuck trying to figure out a way out of the backup problem, and also re-routing personnel configuration for makeshift inboxes, a new strike is launched, thus delaying all incoming e-mails from customers in over an hour. But that’s before the e-mail server is shut down altogether. That obviously not being enough, the CTI client software which enables the customer service to receive and make calls to customers also suffers a heavy attack and is placed on a hypothetical island of instability for which the only sure answer is, “Well, it may or may not work for the entire afternoon, and if it works it’s going to be a little intermittent”. So all in all, no customer is able to reach us neither by phone nor e-mail for the duration.


All in all, it’s taken IT slightly more than half a day to: a) Punch through every single pre-emptive procedural defense and contingency plan of mine, b) Hinder all inbound communication system with customers, and c) Put the blame on me.