Back when I first started in IT I was working for a small home ran business. We got a contract to do some work for Kiwi Dairies (now part of Fonterra) to upgrade their computer systems.

At the same time Kiwi was pushing for a paperless office. Part of this push was to produce 400 sheets of paper for the PC rollout. Wow, that's a decrease in paper if ever I saw one.

But what I have noticed in the 10 or so years I've been in IT is that there's a marked difference between so called tech companies such as service providers like the company I work for and the so called non-tech companies that we support. Working for tech companies is a joke.

Case in point NGC. NGC (now Vector) is basically a non-tech company by definition. It is a service provider manufacturing (although this isn't quite the case) and providing the North Island with gas. NGC, while being a non-tech company, uses some of the coolest tech I've ever had the priviledge to work with.

They have stuff that runs down a pipeline and checks the inside for cracks and other irregularities. Their technicians can walk up to a meter, jack into it, and see all data regarding that meter. Their control room monitors flow for the entire North Island and they can call people to site if they notice anything out of the ordinary. They have systems that allow them to check the status of valves under the ground, see whether there is gas pipelines going to your house, see if you are already connected, and if not do a targetted marketing campaign to get you cooking with gas. They use RTs because most of the places they go to are out of cell signal. They use helicopters to fly along the pipelines and check that everything is okay. And this is only the guys that work on the pipelines. It's more of the same but only different at the actual gas plant.

And then you come to the tech company. The companies like who I currently work for who provide you the service of setting up and maintaining your network systems including servers. The companies who will do site support for you, replace your PCs that they will sell you. So how do we in the technology sector compare with our use of technology?

We suck. We suck so badly that an octopus would be jealous of our ability to suck.

We will try to sell you Gigabit Ethernet but what speed networks do we have? 10Megabit. We will try to sell you the latest computers but what do we use? Your hand me downs.

I mentioned this to my bosses last year at my review and they laughed, not because I was trying to be contentious and my arguments were invalid, but for the exact opposite, I was stating the truth.

But for most of the industry this is the case. The office plebs are the ones who get the good computers but the IT guys are the ones who get the slow machines and yet they're the ones who have to do simple stuff like, oh I don't know... remote control your machines, monitor server status, administer user accounts, administer printers...

The sad fact of life is that the IT guys are forced to become scavengers. Any good model that becomes available will invoke a sort of Mad Max fight to the death in order to get their grubby mitts on said machine. If you're on a job when a better machine comes along, well - you snooze you lose.

How does it get to this? How does it get to the point that IT is meant to support you on machines that predate the invention of the computer in a paradoxical nightmare designed to turn even the most optimistic engineer into a being who believes God can't exist because if he did then pointy haired boss wouldn't have a better machine to view e-mails on that you to be able to do your job?

The simple answer is that the world is skewed towards the manager. These position justifying morons get the gear because they need to stay on top of the technology. After all how good would it look if they turned up to a meeting without a Blackberry and an iMate, and let's not forget the need to have a laptop so that they can leave it sitting on their desk in order to slut off the engineers who could make legitimate use of that glorious mobile computer. They try to sell you the technology by giving a false impression that we actually use that technology.

These are the ones that seem to have enough nouse to stand up to the accountants, those slimey bald freaks with thick rimmed glasses who no one likes to talk too on account of how deathly boring they are - and don't ever get them started on the history of the abacus. I'm sorry if you match this description but aren't one of these - I never in any way meant to call you an accountant.

Accountants were put on this planet to do one thing and one thing only. Ensure the money they have goes up without ever going down.

"The computer system works fine as it is. There's no reason to spend money on it. It will last another 3 years."

"But it's 10 years old now. Three of the hamsters are dead and poor Maurie is about to die."

"But he's still working isn't he? Just get him to take up the slack. We'll worry about it when he dies."

And that's the level of intelligence in those running IT. It's never an ex-engineer that runs an IT department, it's always some paper pusher, most likely an accountant, who can run the department while saving money. In doing so the systems fall apart slowly as one by one the hamsters powering the server are dying of old age. It's only once all the hamsters are dead that any money is spent on anything. But more than likely, instead of getting a system that runs on electricity they only spend enough money to buy five more hamsters, 5 less than the original amount of hamsters powering the system. Mr Accountant Manager man is hailed as a hero because he got the system up and running and did so at minimal cost. Meanwhile the time frame of the system continuing as it is is now five years less as the system now runs half the hamsters. But that doesn't matter because by the time the hamsters die then Mr Accountant Manager man will have moved on.

Who's going to get an iPhone when they come to New Zealand? Are you an engineer? Are you the one that needs one the most because it will make your job infintely more efficient? Are you the one that the Google Maps integration will help you to find the site you're meant to be at quicker? Guess what? Ye who needs it most will never get one bar going out and spending the money yourself. But when you do, make sure you get one before Pointy Haired Boss so that you can rub it in his face. Show him all the things it can do then tell him it's a Nokia N95 and refuse to support him when he asks for help. Tell him he didn't buy the right model and that you can't help him because you haven't had the opportunity to look at a phone like that. Then mention that he should have bought an iPhone like you did because it's so much easier than the Nokia. That'll teach him for not knowing anything about computers. :-)

But there is something that I have noticed in IT. One of our customers has a marketing department that runs Macs. Two Dual-G5 Power Macs. Despite their age - the Macs not the members of the marketing department - they are able to do more than any of the PC people can. In fact, the new machines that are being rolled out to the plebs are being used for nothing more than Word, Excel, and Outlook. Meanwhile the Macs are running Photoshop and Illustrator faster than any of those other machines could. Is it just me or is there something wrong about that?

But when we used to do Woosh installs I had to work on a number of Macs as I was the only one at base that knew how to set them up. I would go to these sites and see them running wireless networks with with PowerBooks and iBooks and iMacs, they would have printers connected via Bonjour, they would have Palms, digital cameras, video cameras, musical instruments all running off them. Every Mac place I went to actually used technology. Many of these were home users using technology that we as IT professionals could only imagine using. Go figure that one out.

But want to hear something funny I did once? I was doing a PC replacement project for one of our customers. I had been given a PC to run GhostCast Server so that I could build these machines. Problem was Auckland needed this machine back. That meant I had no PC to finish this project off. So how did I fix the problem? At that time I had a G4 iBook that had Virtual PC on it. I setup Windows then installed TFTP Server on it (this allows PXE Boot - network boot). Once this was up and running I installed GhostCast Server and proceeded to push the required images out to 5 machines at a time. Considering VPC on an iBook required the emulating of the Intel processor because the iBook used a PPC processor, you'd think the whole thing would have taken an age to do yeah? Nope, it was about 5 minutes slower than the PC I had originally been given to push out the image. Imagine what could be done with Virtualisation that Parallels and VMWare provide today.

I take my Mac into work every now and then and sometimes I take my guitar in. I then hand it over to my mate Aaron who then puts GarageBand through its paces. People just sit there with their jaws dropping.

Now if a home user can spend so much on a Mac with all the toys with it, why can't IT do the same and give us toys that make our jobs actually bearable?

So the next time you have an IT rep come along trying to sell you something, ask what they run. Ask them all about the toys that they use. If they tell you then ask them what the actual engineers use to do their jobs. Chances are they will tell you that we are all running the best gear out there. They're lying. Don't trust them as far as you can throw them.