<sigh> This started in the random crap thread, or possibly the whine thread, moved to the Minor Rant thread on Friday, and now it's coming in here. The email address through which I get 100% of my role related emails and 100% of my faxes was deleted Wednesday night. It's a yearly expiring email alias and it expired - but I wasn't the owner of the account when the notification went out that it was due to expire, so I didn't get any notice. The guy who was the owner of the account did get an email notifying him that the address was due to expire, which suddenly reminded him that he was still the owner of the account. He didn't want to be the owner of the account anymore, so he contacted me to take over for him, but failed to mention that the entire reason he was contacting me was because he got an automated system message telling him the account was going to expire. Hell, his department screwed this role up so badly, it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't even bother to read the email, just saw that it was about the alias and immediately contacted me to get rid of it.
Now I'm having to deal with MSIT, who are nothing if not the world standard for lazy, inept IT departments. They did some brief exploratory work on it last Thursday, then reported back to me that there was nothing they could do because the account had been deleted 14 days earlier. I, of course, responded that I was very confused as to how that could be true, seeing as how the account was live as of the previous day at 5:00pm (it was my way of politely calling bullshit), so they "re-escalated" the ticket. And that's the last we've heard of the whole deal, but not for lack of trying. Friday morning I sent them a follow up email, asking for a status report. That afternoon my boss and I called IT to ask about the status, only to be told that they were working on it, but that they might not be working on it right then. We were also told that yes, IT does have a priority system, but the person we talked to couldn't explain the system and couldn't tell us what sort of priority this ticket had within the system; and also that this latest tech would apply the label "work stoppage" to the ticket, to let them know that it's a serious problem, but that she couldn't say for certain that that would let them know that it was a serious problem or that it would cause them to work it any faster.
Meanwhile, the only way customers can contact us right now for Next of Kin related inquiries is by postal mail (or by FedEx, etc.), which MS Mail Services frequently loses and/or mis-routes. Back in February I got a stack of mail that various people in the company who aren't me and have nothing to do with NOK had received and had attempted to route to yet another person who isn't me and who still doesn't have anything to do with NOK; and some of the mail was from as far back as October - meaning that in several of the cases there was nothing I could do because the accounts had already expired by the time the mail got to me, but hadn't yet when the people sending the mail had sent it. It's boring enough around here when people can contact me and I just don't have enough to do to fill my days, it's ridiculous when people can't even contact me. Oh, and the kicker? IT has suggested that, since this may take a while, I should just request approval for the re-creation of the alias. Unfortunately, that takes at least 48 hours and approval from several levels of the company just to recreate the alias, and even more time for IT to create a mailbox and get the routing set up correctly so that I have access to it. Back when my division was originally taking over the project and I was just starting out, it took 2 weeks just for me to get access, and the alias was already in existence at that point.
It sure is a good thing I don't work for a major tech company, or this would just be silly.
