Friday, July 11, 2008

Its a little bit arrogance (I won't deny that) and a little bit irritation that makes me want to say this. Knowing that it's a little bit arrogance it what keeps me from saying it to people at work, I don't want to be that person.

At work, I've been struggling with a corporate IT/web person for two months to get what I've considered a simple five-minute change done. I wanted a domain name to get forwarded to a new site. I knew for a fact what service was hosting the domain name, because I assisted in getting it set up, and I knew how to set up a forwarding address because it's the same service I use for all my website projects. I figured I could make the request and the next day it would be done. Simple.

This corporate person responded with all kinds of gobbledy-gook about DNS servers and this and that. He was going on and on about how the DNS host was in our old register.com account and that we had to buy a new DNS host. And I'll give him full credit for knowing a whole lot more about the inner workings of the web and DNS servers and domain names, etc than I do. But I couldn't understand why he couldn't just change it to the new host, without paying money, and have it work exactly the same as all my domain names do?

We literally went back and forth, in emails, about every two weeks... when I remembered that it STILL wasn't working and contacted him, yet again. He repeated the same things to me and I repeated the same things to him, still not clearly understanding why this was so stinkin' complicated.

Finally, two days ago, sick of it, I asked him if I could just call him. Then, I logged into MY server accounts so I could see a similar thing as he was seeing, and I asked him to log into the account managing this domain name. Then I said 'why don't you just go to this page and click on the DNS server and change it to the default?'

He did. And it worked. So Simple. By last night, everything was working just fine.

I'm not really that smart, maybe I just keep everything simple and some IT people make it all too complicated. I don't know. But while I'm glad it's fixed I'm still a little perplexed that this big corporate IT guy couldn't figure out how to do that on his own two months ago. And what's he thinking when he gets the email from me saying that it's all working great now?

by yellowgirl at 10:33 AM |