I kid you not

I kid you not, a photo by Damian Gadal on Flickr.

This is the computer I use at work... I kid you not.

My day job is in accounting for a small government department, which is a part of a larger municipal organization.

My current computer which runs Windows XP with Office 2003 is functional but dying, which you can kind of tell by the black duct tape holding it together, was supposed to be replaced with a like kind Dell (don't get me started on that) running Windows XP and Office 2007.

Not much of an upgrade, I know.  So, a new machine was ordered by our IT Department in December of 2010, and arrived the following January 2011.

This "new" computer then sat in my cubicle from January 2011 unto the beginning of October 2012.  It never got installed.  Why?  Because I insisted that my scanner (crucial equipment) and fax modem be installed.  I've been more or less paperless for more than a decade in my work area (we have no physical storage) and I love the convenience digital documents.

So, this October, the computer got picked up by the IT Department from my area to be "imaged" and brought back and installed.  A week went by and no word on how things were going.  On week two I got a phone call about the Scanner and Fax options I was requesting (I want a machine that matches the capabilities of my current machine), and after lots of back and forth they said they'd work on it.  But not until after lecturing me about asking for old technology, and I could not help but laugh at that, pointing out that they were installing old technology with my "new" two plus year old computer.

So, three weeks (on top of the 20 plus months already mentioned) have gone by and no computer has been installed.

If folks have any doubts about government inefficiency, they shouldn't.  I've seen it first hand from the inside for more than 25 years.  It's bad and getting worse.  People should be much more outraged than they are.  Unless government modernizes in a cost effective manner it won't be able to serve the public, and as much of it should be outsourced as possible.  This will require breaking some of the union stranglehold on government.

To sum up this rather long post, my "new" computer will probably end up getting installed by 2013 (government does very little work during the last two months of the year because of the holidays).

I thoght it would be interesting to compare what's been developed during my two year wait to have an antique installed, and I'll use Apple as an example, so here we go:

iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad 2, 3, 4, and iPad mini, iOS5, iOS6, new Apple TV, two versions of OSX, new Mac Mini, new mac books, new iMac.... You get the idea.

Hell, even Microsoft upgraded their OS to Windows 8 and came out with the Surface tablet, not to mention newer versions of Office.

So, yes, tech development is speeding up, and government is falling further and further behind and never shall the two meet.

Government is failing at an accelerating rate.