How many IT staff does it take to use a projector?
In which four IT staff do battle with a misbehaving projector and wonder why we keep trying to fix things.
This week I had the misfortune to be called in to the office for a meeting. It was the first time I'd actually met some of my colleagues in person rather than as a 2-D image on a Teams call. We assembled in one of the meeting rooms and tried to connect a MacBook Pro to the projector for a presentation. Plugged in the HDMI cable - nothing happened.
Now, being a highly-trained, well-educated and resourceful group of four IT staff we attempted to fix the situation. We pressed all the buttons. We tried different laptops. We switched things off and on again (I told you we were highly-trained professionals). Nothing worked.
I did take this opportunity to point out that we wouldn't have had this problem if we were all working remotely on a Teams call 😄
Eventually, we admitted defeat and sought out another member of IT to help us (maybe the answer to the question "how many IT staff are required to make a projector work?" is "five"). That's when we were told "oh yeah, the projector doesn't work".
Two things come to mind from this interaction. Firstly, why hadn't anybody thought to put a note on the lectern to say "this projector doesn't work, don't waste half your meeting trying to fix it"?
Secondly, why did we spend so much time trying to fix it? My theory is that we in IT are so conditioned to technology misbehaving and so frequently are the ones expected to make it behave that we think it must be something we're doing wrong. A "normal" person faced with faulty tech would relatively quickly lose patience and ask for help. But those of who spend our days fighting with curly brackets have a compulsion to keep plugging away at it. We've experienced so many occasions where we've invested hours into tracing the root cause of a bug and experienced the elation of finally getting that code to compile or that PC to boot up. We're addicts. We're dopamine junkies. Always looking for the next (literal) fix. The next victorious high that comes from commanding the ones and zeros to do our bidding.
