I'm an IT director in SF, and I had been beating the drum that COVID-19 needed to be taken seriously for over a month. My warnings were ignored, my emails went unread, and no one was even remotely interested in talking about COVID-19 until last week. Not my boss the CFO, the HR Director, not the CEO

Now suddenly the SF Bay Area is under a shelter-at-home order, and everyone is getting pissy with me and my department because we're not able to help every single user get set up to work from home instantly.

As IT, we can't work from home. We need to give you your computer equipment, we need to be in the office when hardware goes down, and we're interacting with nearly every single employee in the office. We're risking COVID-19 everyday, and will for the duration of this pandemic.

So yes, the mic on your laptop doesn't work. 15 other people who have never called into a Zoom conference before have also discovered their mic doesn't work either. We can't fix all of them within the first 2-3 minutes of that very first call. Yes, it's "essential" that Beth be able to call it. Same with Joe. And yes, it's a big deal that Gayle can't attend this meeting. We get it; but there's only two of us!

This is new for us too. I've had to implement disaster plans on three separate occasions in the past. I know what disasters look like. I warned the executives that once a plan was executed, you were going to discover a slew of issues no one anticipated. That's what happens the first time you execute a plan. Expect it. No one listened and now everyone is using their 20/20 hindsight to tell us what we should have done. You didn't care last week! You rolled your eyes when I called for stakeholders' meeting.

Your IT guys are freaking out. They want to be safe, they want to fix your problem, and they want to do it as fast as possible. They've never done this before and they're learning as they go. Telling them that you're frustrated by how bad everything is going is a real dick move.

IT people all over the country are quitting rather than risk being exposed. If your team is still there, they're damn heroes. You don't think so? Trying doing all this without them and see how well it goes!

Same for HR, by the way!

Chill out, express some gratitude, and be kind to each other in this stressful time.

Edit: My CEO just sent out a company-wide email thanking the HR director for all he’s done. His first mention of COVID-19 was last week.

IT hasn’t seen one “thank you” from anyone.

Next time I guess I’ll just wait until the last second so I can get a thank you for scrambling to put together a response at the last second too