My COVID-19 Experience While Working in IT

Unprecedented Times

COVID-19 or the Coronavirus has had a major impact on us in 2020. This is an unprecedented world we are living in with so much uncertaintity and misinformation. COVID-19 has destabilized the entire globe. Something that I have not seen ever. Its put the entire global economy at a standstill. When the news first started ramping up to a high level of urgency, it was roughly middle of March 2020. There was no plans of closing anything yet, however, panic was indeed growing. The company I work for was not yet panicking and had no real concrete plan. There were talks in meetings of what we might do and what was possible, but no action had been taken yet. Then came the email that would keep the IT department up day and night for the next week. 

The day of reckoning

We were going to give everyone laptops, VPN access, and send them home to work. Sounds easy right? Well for us we are/were (depending when you read this) more or less in the infancy stage of an IT department. So we had almost zero inventory available for spare laptops. This involved purchase a gazillion laptops (like 100 really) and setting them all up to give out to users. It was an all hands on deck situation really. Everyone was helping with everything. I am sort of a jack of all trades (BUT King of the Network). I’ve done it all from desktop support to web design to graphic design. I was more or less comfortable with assisting where I could. There was a moment when I knew things were getting serious when I walked into our board room and there were about 20 boxes of laptops piled up and the dev team was setting up Windows 10 on them. So after getting everyone their laptops and sending them home, we were done you’d think, right? Well…no…now we had to contend with user error which involved calls from users not charging their laptop batteries to what was their password for their home wifi. (I am not kidding you) 

Is that the right password?

Not only did we have to support users at our mothership office, but we had remote offices as well. These were a bit challenging as well. We had to get in contact with the user. Setup Zoom meeting. I love Zoom now. Not a plug but they really came through during this pandemic. Now we were in the territory of supporting users issues at their homes. This was definitely a gray area. One in which we were happy to draw line. 

Keep your eye on the prize

So working from home came with its unique challenges. More so not being able to go out to lunch with your coworkers and talk about why we had that meeting and how we wouldn’t get our time back. This also tests your time management skills and organization. We had a daily 30 minute catch up meeting which was fine but was more of an attendance thing if you get my drift. However, this did give some structure to the whole thing. Really. It also made for a couple of entertaining meetings where personalities clashed. 

Back to life Back to Reality. Well almost…

So since we officially started working from home, states (I am in the US btw) started to slowly open back up. This meant getting acclimated to the daily commute again. Small talk with coworkers from 6ft of distance. And finding if the water cooler is still a place to hang out. The verdict is it isn’t. My company came up with a policy for returning back to the office admist the pandemic still being a thing. They had temp checks and liability forms to sign. Gloves, masks, and sanitizer. Given that we interface a lot with users, face-to-face, going back to work created some new challenges. Until this virus situation is resolved face-to-face support is a huge risk. We are now on a rolling schedule. Sort of like Team A and Team B. It is still not sorted however. Going back to work while there is still a pandemic does not seem like the smart choice. However, this is what we are faced with as bills and rent mount up. I know we will get through this and back to where you can cough in your hand and no one cares.