June 18, 2007
Therapy for Tired Tech Gurus
In July, The Chronicle will offer a new podcast called Tech Therapy. Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who works with colleges, will talk about the headaches, anxieties, and general problems you might be having with technology on your campus.
The podcast will be interactive. Scott and Warren will take your questions and comments about campus technology and talk about the issues the questions that they raise. File-sharing, security, dealing with vendors, figuring out how to talk to your president, or how to talk to your CIO — it’s all game for a therapy session.
The Tech Therapists will respect patient confidentiality: If you want to submit your questions anonymously, just say so in your message.
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I am A Tech Administrator and as such have mixed feelings about the concept for this podcast. On the one hand, I certainly feel that I need therapy on a daily basis … stuff is hard. Vendors lie, charge too much, and are otherwise simply evil. Stuff breaks, and my employees lose sleep, forget to eat, ruin their health, and experience marital break-ups as a result. So please – yes, I need the therapy.
On the other hand, I hear a lot of unrealistic expectations from end-users that come across as whining or complaining (though I’m sure they’re not intended that way). They don’t understand how hard it is to keep stuff running. They think we’re over-paid, though most anybody on my staff could double their salaries if they worked outside of academe (including me). We are yelled at and abused and accused of being in cahoots with the vendors (because our contracts with the vendors forbid us from explaining the source of outages to our users – that’s “Vendor’s Confidential Information”) – but in our service role, are expected to be positive at all times. People think we’re not doing enough, but paradoxically – our budgets are too big. It is hard, very hard. Everybody thinks that they can do our job better than us.
So in this sense, the concept of this podcast makes me cringe … the idea of a podcast entirely devoted to complaints and grievances related to technology is something close to my worst nightmare.
I’ll keep an open mind about it and will certainly be downloading the first episode. I hope that it is even-handed in its treatment of us IT folks though – we get enough abuse already. :-)
— A Tech Administrator Jun 19, 09:43 AM #
Sounds very interesting, I will certainly check it out.
I have my own brand of “PodCast Therapy”. I’ve started a comedy PodCast that spoofs tech support call-in shows. My alter-ego, Stewie Bronson, can say and do things that I can’t in my real life.
As an added bonus, I’m getting more real-world experience with the hardware and software that I support at work.
Check it out at
http://stewiebronson.com
Michael Richardson
Media Studio Coordinator
Williams College
— Michael Richardson Jun 19, 10:36 AM #
Sounds like a “A Podcast too Far.” Crankygeeks.com (John Dvorak) is wonderful, instructive, and affirmative. I also listen to Infoworld Daily and the Gartner Monthly Technology Review. That’s all the tech podcast I care to digest in a month, and these are related to trends and new technology / enterprise issues.
Service providers always have challenges architecting the right mix between consumer demands and the cost / quality mix of the services they provide. Technology is no different, and right now I am in information / blog / podcast overload. Best wishes on the endeavor, and I hope you gain an audience.
— Matthew Hall Jun 19, 11:00 AM #