Some years back, it was decided that our analogue phone system would be replaced.

Once this decision was made and everything signed, we in IT were notified of this change.

In that order. Yes.

My boss naturally let his many and well qualified thoughts be known, but as is common here these were dismissed. For those familiar with OFSTED, our overall rating was "Good", while their rating for Senior Management was "Needs Improvement". For those not familiar a government agency rated us as 3/4 stars overall and 2/4 stars for management (4/4 being Outstanding and 1/4 being Inadequate).

The person responsible for this was neither IT or senior management, I don't recall her role exactly now but she was the villain of many of my stories. How her proposal got accepted without our input or even knowledge would be mysterious and a cause for great concern anywhere else, but what can I say any more eloquently or succinctly that OFSTED have not?

So we meet with the supplier. Our questions are asked, and some are answered. One in particular was compatibility with ethernet daisy chaining computers with our existing setup - VLAN'd, solid and secure as it was. "Yes yes yes, all that will work". One of the techs in particular had an attitude that I could describe as "needs improvement" and customer service skills that were "inadequate". I had the strong feeling from him that he was in his very early 20s, possibly this was his first techy job, and was absolutely blindly loyal to the company having known little else in his career. His response to many of our concerns could essentially be translated to "No. Our product is good. Our product is beautiful. Our product is right, and you are wrong to question it".

I sat in on one training session. There was one member of staff in HR who I had a good relationship with and had been very kind and supportive to me over the years when I needed it, and she was always very appreciative when it was my turn to support her technical issues. We respected each other and were humble to each other's expertise, I had a soft spot for her and was always available to her - a few occasions in the fire together trying to get the monthly payroll processed with a third party on time will forge strong bonds. She was very excited and asked a very interesting, pertinent question about a certain feature. Mr Inadequate got Right. In. Her. Face. and hissed "NO! It doesn't do that!". She was absolutely crushed and I was incensed.

Do our desktops PXE boot through the phones? Do they balls. All staff are now without both their computer AND desk phone whenever we need to reimage. Mr Inadequate's response is of course to blame our network. I'm neither surprised or bothered by this, who amongst us, hey? Evasion and misdirection of blame between IT and a supplier? Bread and butter work, all the live long day. I'm not angry at Mr Inadequate for this, I'm deeply disturbed. He's not making excuses. He BELIEVES. He's of absolute faith in the infallibility of The Product. It's actually a little frightening to see the zealotry a young man can display for reselling a third rate IP telephony system.

My boss does all he can to mitigate the nightmares, there are delays and pushback from us and the general staff. Complaints roll in, we redirect everyone moaning to us in the Villain's direction and make it clear who is liaising (responsible) for all queries related to the new phone system. As we weren't consulted there is nothing we can do, there's no technical requirement to hold them to or UAT for them to complete. There's barely a week of snagging support, then we're shunted to their helpdesk for standard assistance.

The only happy ending to any of this was when the Villain who had unleashed all of this on us made a very genuine, very sincere, and very out of character apology to us.