The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Starting a job with the railroad is much akin to trying to crawl your way out of a water spout during the middle of monsoon season in the rain forest. With every inch of progress we make towards getting access to the proper servers and databases, we encounter a new problem that sets us back twice as far. It's a seemingly neverending hierarchy of error messages that exponentially builds upon itself.

The amusing thing is that these are all basic problems that somebody such as myself, a mere peon in the grand scheme of tech support gurus, could easily fix provided I had administrative access. Instead, process impedes progress, and I am getting paid to surf the internet until the chain of command gets back to me with a solution, at which point I send my brand new set of problems back up the chain. Just to give an idea of the process:

- I start working on the project and get towards the end of step 1

- I get an error message that prevents me from moving on to step 2

- I asses the problem to see what might be throwing the error in case it's operator error or just something I can fix locally on my own, else it just helps to explain the problem to Tech Support

- I run a series of tests to fix the problem, based on hypothesis determined at previous step

- I find out that I can't fix the problem locally due to lack of admin rites, even though it is a local problem

- I notify my supervisor of the problem

- Supervisor notifies manager

- Manager breaks balls of supervisor about how it should theoretically work

- Supervisor pwns manager

- Manager actually listens to the problem this time, but still has to question every little detail as to what stuff I need access to and exactly why

- Supervisor pwns manager again

- Manager finally caves to the request, but doesn't really know how anything works, so refers us to Tech Support

- Supervisor and I call Tech Support to explain problem

- Tech Support busts our balls for interrupting their "work" by actually making them work

- Tech Support calls manager to make sure they have clearance to perform operations

- Tech Support bumbles through the problem and doesn't fix anything

- Supervisor and I determine how to fix the problem on our own, but still need admin access

- Supervisor and I call Tech Support back and hold their hand through the problem

- Problem is fixed the next day as the software is automatically "pushed" onto my machine over night

- I log on to my computer the next day to find out what other problems were created by solution to previous problem

- I go home from a long and slow day of "work" and talk myself down from the ledge after a few beers

- ???

- Profit

As you're probably thinking right about now, Rube Goldberg himself couldn't possibly come up with a more complicated machine to accomplish our menial day to day tasks if he was suddenly named CEO.