Technology woes

I work for a nonprofit organization. That means if we want to overhaul our website, someone has to fund the project. It's hard to convince a funder to pay for a new website when there's so much other necessary work to be done...like educating children.

We have overhead of course, but there's not enough to fund major projects. Anyway, we got a $35,000 grant six months ago to fund some of our technology needs.

Our relatively new tech guy can't seem to get it through his head though that we are a NONPROFIT organization. He insisted we get Office 2007. He had all the reasons in the world why we had to have it. Then when we got it, he informed us that everything we do must be saved in 97-2003 compatibility mode because none of our partners have Office 2007.

No shit.

So every time I'm at the copier and this guy walks by he always sighs and mentions how we have to get a new copier. Well, I'm done listening to this clownshoe.

"Why?" I ask, emphasizing my annoyance.

"Because we need a color copier. And they have new ones now where you can actually send copy jobs from your desktop."

"I have been here for almost four years and never once have I heard anyone complain that they couldn't make color copies. And why do we have to copy from our desktop? It's a pretty small office and people like getting up once in a while."

"It will make us all more efficient."

"We're a NON-profit. If it's not broken, don't fix it."

You may think I sounded like a bitch just then, but let me explain. This guy would never ever get permission to do HALF the shit he says he's going to do. It's not up to him, it's up to our finance director. I'm so sick of hearing about his big plans.

Today it was that he wants to get the leadership staff using RSS feeds. I'm not going to lie. I don't know exactly what that is. But if I'm not familiar with it and never heard anyone express a need for it, then I can pretty much guarantee you that our 55+ average aged leadership staff won't see the need for it either.

I'm all about upgrading and being more efficient. We're not like that episode of the Office here where Michael thought upgrading was a nasty ploy to rub out all the older folks. We got Outlook up and running over the past two days and that's great because our e-mail system was WHACK and really quite ridiculous. We recently got Raiser's Edge because our development records were actually on real paper and in real paper folders.

We're totally growing up and it's very cool. But I just can't stand when this guy says we need to set up conference calls via web cam. Our partners are dirt, shit, poor and what the hell is the point of using webcams when none of the people we do business with on a day to day business have webcams! People in the nonprofit sector typically don't make a lot of money and typically do a lot the old fashioned way. There are about a million exceptions to what I'm saying but I'm not talking about WWF or United Way; I'm talking about your organizations who have four employees that work their asses off and do great work.

And for the love of God, someone tell me why this guy bought me a new computer last year that can burn DVD's but not CD's!? I have to go to him every time I need a CD burned. Should work computers even have the ability to watch or burn DVD's? That seems a little odd to me.

Anyway, this guy has come up with some ridiculous shit. Everything is urgent too. We're talking about a guy who walks into meetings without a pen or paper too and you actually have to say, "you may want to get a pen and paper."

But nevertheless, I am now an Office 2007 user and an Outlook user. Every time I open the 2003 version of Word at home, I get confused. It's like jumping on my brother's old hand-me-down word processor.