This post is dedicated to my colleagues in Pasila, who are doing fantastic work to make our life with IT a bit easier.
I was a bit amused when the person responsible for all administrative matters in the embassy told me that now that it’s so hot, the internet will occassionally be down. Surely the IT must be planned so well that the important work carried out in the Finnish embassies, both in the diplomatic section and the consular and visa affairs, is not disrupted with trivial IT problems, I thought. But I was so wrong.
Besides our satellite connection occassional overheating, the receiver part broke down a week ago Tuesday evening. I kept calling the help desks in Finland and the Netherlands, got to practise my engineering skills with troubleshooting the receiver module and finally had the replacement part sent immediately from Oslo via DHL. And convinced the not-so-technical staff of the embassy of ordering the repair engineer only once instead of twice, saving the Finnish taxpayer’s money directly over one thousand euros. I’m getting cheap to the Ministry!
So there we were, in the middle of the busiest time to set meetings for our Väyrynen with his Nigerian counterparts, without internet connection.
We sent the driver to get one of these usb stick internet connections, and I shared the connection through wlan with my macbook to cover the personal laptops the staff had brought (our computers don’t have wlan cards). Suprised by the amazement of the other staff, for once I felt that maybe there is a demand for people from my mixture-of-everything degree programme.
Still, our server is physically located in the embassy, and without the satellite connection we could not access the emails, and the consular staff could not access any of the visa and other important systems. Even worse, the three business days promised by DHL was too much as Friday was a holiday so the repair part was only delivered on Monday – meaning that the emails sent to the embassy emails started bouncing back to their senders. Really, I think that’s unacceptable. Not to mention the sending of official emails and verbal notes from our ugly gmail and yahoo email-addresses.
Finally on Monday we got the repair part and a local engineer who did a fantastic job and fixed the satellite in no time.
Then, on Tuesday, we hosted a press reception at the embassy, and on my way home late in the evening I get a text message from the Ambassor saying the internet is not working again … could not believe it. The next day at the office I learn that we have a scheduled maintenance break! Thanks, IT department!
What did I learn from this incident? Most suprising to me was that the other staff seemed to quietly accept the situation, while I was the only one really demanding that we never should have ended up with that mess. Like IT was something so complicated that it could not be handled and managed.
So despite the challenging times, keep up the good work, Helsinki, Stockholm and Copenhagen!
