Life as Crisis Management: The IT Kiada

Yes, dear readers, it is that time again. It is time for yet another episode in my Kafkaesque and Voinavichian excursions through America's bureaucracies. This time the episode centres on my experience with one bureaucracy at the place where I work part-time, SUNY Oneonta, a liberal arts college in the beautiful Catskills of New York.

This academic year one of the departments I teach in, History, had its part-time adjunct office moved from Alumni Hall on the very south end of campus to the Milne Library where every library should be, in the centre of campus. We history adjuncts share the office with English Department adjuncts.

Before we made the move we were asked by the History Department secretary if any of us would prefer to have a Mac in the office. I am a Mac--I got a MacBook and later a MacBook Pro after two of the three laptop PC's I bought broke down within a year, specifically a Dell and a Toshiba--so I said yes. And lo and behold there was a Mac desktop computer waiting for me when I arrived at my office in Milne 309.

There was only one problem. I didn't know the password to the two entry portals of the Mac. So off I went to the History Department. They didn't know since the library IT folks set up the computers in the office. So I went to IT not once but twice. Three weeks into classes and one week after I went to the IT office in the basement of Milne I finally got a happy ending. I can now use the Mac desktop in my office at Milne. Sometimes bureaucracies do work if sometimes slowly particularly if you are, like me, a lowly adjunct.