Business justification

Monday morning I call IT to ask about my Outlook calendar that had gone missing.

Obviously this was a first for the person I talked to. He asked two questions:

-          Are you the only one who has lost her calendar?... Yes

-          Do you need your calendar? I mean did you have many meetings?...Well, my whole life is in there, so Yes I need it.

Sadly he couldn’t fix it and after talking for 5 long minutes with his manager (while I was on hold) he told me my manager’s approval is needed for the restoration of my calendar.

I asked my manager, I got his approval on email, I forwarded the email to the IT guy and a few hours later he came back to me with the following:

-          What’s the business justification? I need your manager to explain the business justification on top of his approval.

This is one of these moments where I choose not to answer right away because there would be blood. Why on earth would I need my calendar to operate? Why would I need to know with whom I need to meet, where and when?????

I was utterly annoyed and told the IT guy via email to try without. If they reject the request, I will survive.

Reality is that by the end of Monday I had recovered about 30% of my calendar by asking people to forward me invites. By Tuesday I was easily at 50%. By the time the IT team starts working on my case, if they start, I will have probably recovered 80% by myself making the restoration pretty useless.

Still I find it highly frustrating that when something like this happens they can’t fix it within 24H and I need a business justification on top of my manager’s approval. Grrrrr!!!!!