SL, aren't you a sound engineer?
Indeed I am although over the years I have become more of a 'Support Audio Engineer' in that I support the staff Sound Engineers in terms of studio hardware (mics and mixers) and software and computer hardware. However the latter tends to step on the toes a little of our 'real' I.T. engineers.
why don't they employ a network engineer to sort it out for you? can't be a valid use of your time doing that can it?
That's just it though, we do. Two I.T. departments in fact! Unfortunately though there are multiple issues with this:
1. Neither I.T. department really wants to support us for various reasons that make no sense. Basically they each say that the other I.T. Department should help us - result is that nobody helps us.
2. One of our audio systems is one called SADiE which is software combined with proprietary hardware. Nobody in our I.T. department knows anything about SADiE whatsoever, and to be fair why should they, it's very specialised software/hardware and not something they would have come across before. Whilst SADiE might just be a Windows program there are certain things about it that don't fit into a 'bog standard office PC' approach. One very minor example is that Anti-Virus software plays havoc with it and you have to know what files or directories not to scan. I've been an audio engineer for 20 years and for 17 years I've used SADiE. To put it simply, I know more about SADiE then everyone else in my organisation combined.
3. Our I.T. departments are only really experienced about networks and PC's for general office use and wouldn't know that the choice of chipset used on the North Bridge can dramatically effect how a professional sound card operates. Again, this is not their fault. 99% of all computers in my organisation are just basic off the shelf Dell PC's which only run MS Office.
4. Our I.T. department are very slow at getting anything done. For example I logged a job with them on Monday and still nobody has even phoned to ask for more details. If we have a problem in a studio that means we can't record we need it fixed in minutes, not hours or days.
As a result I try to involve our I.T. departments as little as possible because the majority of times that they do come to fix something they end up breaking something else, simply because they don't know how our systems work, how they are integrated and how much data we are pushing around the network.
You are absolutely right though, this is a complete waste of my time, it's just that if I don't do it either:
1. Won't get fixed
2. Will take another year to be fixed
3. Will take another year to be fixed but will then have broken something else
I don't want to sound like I'm slagging off our I.T. department because there are some things they know infinitely more than me about, it's just getting them to do something and do it in a way that won't mess other things up is virtually impossible!
