Where Have I Been?

Work is totally insane...it's normal to see things get crazier after the holidays, I'm sure that's true in any line of work. The Nevada Legislature is in session, and this one is probably one of the hairiest I've ever seen in my 18 years as a state employee - agencies are trying desperately to justify their budgets and ensure no more is lost in funding/staff/entire agencies that the governor might (and probably will) try to slash at this point. Speaking of slashing, here's something keeping us busy - back in 2007 when the housing market first started to decline, the first thing our lovely governor cut completely was equipment budgets of all kinds: repair, upgrades and replacement. Now that our economy is in crisis, we're probably not going to see funding for these items until 2012. To put this into perspective, more than half of our equipment was rolled out in 2004 or before. That's eight years, and in IT, that's wayyyyyy beyond the life expectancy of any equipment.

We've been through budget cuts many times before, and you learn to band-aid systems as much as possible... users get used to logging in, making a call or two and THEN seeing the system finish loading. Users also get familiar with waiting to see us for days at a time, as our work backlog gets huge and we have to prioritize the problems (Is the whole site down? Drop everything. Is a printer broken? It can wait in a queue.) It's truly a test of patience when your job productivity is brought to a crawl by the technology your agency depends on to function, but State employees sure do know how to do more with less. It's making my life pretty crazy but I know there's no end in sight, so I'm not letting it stress me out. It is, however, making me pretty tired by the end of the day, so I've been pretty lazy around blogland.

Hope you're all having a great week!! I am, really. Just sleepy. :)