I'm the canary in the coal mine.

Yesterday, the networked computers were down when I arrived at work. So, I left a voice mail for the help desk -- hoping that they'd notice that it was before 5:30 a.m. and realize that their decision to disband our department's computer support and centralize it for the entire campus isn't necessarily the best thing for those of us who come to work before 8 a.m.

Shortly after 5:30 a.m., my cell. phone rang. It was G, who used to run our computer support and officially has nothing to do with us any longer. She was trying to log in from home but couldn't, and she wondered if we were having problems. (Oh boy, were we.) She got on the horn with her former coworkers, and they fixed the problem in about an hour. She also mentioned that, if we had any other problems, she'd be in her office by 7 a.m.

The help desk phoned at 8:51 a.m. to confirm that they had received my message and to add that one of G's former coworkers, who now works in the help desk dept., had informed them that he had fixed the problem already. (Thankfully, or else I would have been sitting here, twiddling my thumbs for three-and-a-half hours before they called.)

G told me that, since I'm the first one on the computers in the morning, "You're our canary." Sure, it's good that I alert others of problems early on, but I don't care for a metaphor that involves me dying while everyone else scrambles to get the heck out. (On the brighter side, it now gives me the chance to get "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "Whistling in the Dark", both by They Might Be Giants, stuck in my head.)

There are two other aspects to this I want to share. First, our new computer support had sent out an e-mail the day before, warning everyone in our dept. that they would be working on the network that night -- but they sent it at 4:30 p.m., two hours after my staff and I went home, so we were totally unaware. Second, after our network problem was fixed, there still was the problem with the computer terminals that our hourly employees used to enter their time each day (and it was still down when we left yesterday).

I'm not sure what the new computer support did (or intended to do), but this sounds to me like a case for, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."