The IT Guy

This morning I was locked out of my computer for 2 hours. I arrived at 7:05 AM today (almost on time!) and had to sit in my cube staring at the wall until 9:00 AM when the IT guy called me. As I mention in the "Cast of Characters" panel to the left, the IT guy hates me.

Whenever I tell coworkers this, they always say "Qari hates you?? He's always sooooo nice to me!" And indeed, I've seen him interact with other people and he's always nice and friendly and cheerful with them. But with me, nope! He won't even look at me when we pass each other in the halls. He'll speak to me from my coworker's cube rather than come into mine. He responds at the drop of a hat for everyone else, but no such luck for me! He actually got in at 8:30 AM this morning, I know because I heard him come in. I left a huge note on his keyboard requesting his immediate assistance, but he waited until 9:00 AM to reset my password. To kill time, I did both the crossword puzzle and sudoku.

So why does Qari hate me? It all stems back to my 2nd day here at FederalEntity. The computer that was provided for me when I first started in 2005 was a real crapbox. It was a Pentium 3 (Pentium 4 came out in 2000, just for reference) and it had a floppy disk drive. Remember floppy disks?? Anyways, this computer was super old and it was painfully slow. It took almost a full minute to open up simple MS Word documents. PDFs? Forget about it!

I told my boss that my computer was really really slow, and he asked the IT guy Qari if he would look into getting me a new PC. I'm not sure if Qari was just having a bad day, or if he wanted to show the "new kid" who was boss, but upon receiving this request from my boss he completely flipped out. He stormed down to my cube, accused me of lying and exaggerating about how slow my computer was, then went into my boss' office and scolded him for having the audacity to request a new PC.

My second day and I had already been spurned for making a simple and completely reasonable request. Foreshadowing for the rest of my Federal career???

To make a long story short, my boss told his boss about the incident, and Quari (who is a contractor) got into some kind of trouble with his contracting company. I was assured by several levels of management that such an incident would never happen again. And from that day on, Qari has made every effort possible to hate me without verbalizing his disdain.

In general, I'm fine with it, although it's really awkward when I run into him in the men's room.