There has been enough time between when this happened and now that I can talk about it without wanting to drink embalming fluid. When I started here $BG was the supervisor for the service desk but all last year it was hinted at that he misses being on the tech side of things and wants to go back. So towards the end of the year last year $BG was demoted moved over as a level 3 analyst on the newly created Desktop Engineering team. As a result $CC was promoted to our supervisor. Don't get me wrong, $CC has done a much better job overall except when it comes to making sure we have stock of hotswaps for replacement.

They've also been talking about the EPIC 2015 upgrade. Part of the upgrade is that we were going to Citrix XenApp 7.xx from our current Citrix XenApp 6.5 farm. This also meant we had to stop using the Citrix online plugin 12.xx on clients and move to Citrix Receiver 4.3. The way it was designed is that there would be about 6 hours of downtime while the move happened and during that time we would uninstall the Citrix online plugin and push the receiver. And because there was a high chance of success using our tried and true method of deploying software, Altiris, they decided that they also wanted to throw a rabid cat into the mix by using the Symantec Management agent to push out the uninstallers and installers.

And like getting photographic evidence of what your wife's new boyfriend is doing to your wife while you're at work, the sadness came pouring down in dump truck sized portions. 2/3rds of the computers got the new receiver but Desktop Engineering didn't test it fully, or screwed up the package, and those that got the new software didn't automatically get the new shortcuts AND it didn't remove the old shortcuts to EPIC. So for 2 weeks we talked to nearly every single employee and walked them through deleting the existing shortcuts, right clicking on the "black circle with white lines running through it" and choosing refresh.

And while that took all of about 30 seconds to accomplish, we had to do it for almost every single employee and sometimes the same employee on multiple workstations because they couldn't remember our original instructions from a couple hours ago. And because that wasn't enough fail, after the upgrade our Topaz e-signature devices no longer worked in EPIC on all servers. They were still using COM1, they still had the driver and the patient could see their signature on the e-sig but the nurses couldn't see them in EPIC. So we have to end their Citrix session and sometimes have to end their session 3-4 times before they get on a server that works. And Desktop Engineering didn't explain why they didn't notify us about the little desktop shortcut problem and didn't apologize.