IT services and The Three Chinese Curses

In America, October is the time when haunting, evil spirits and curses come to mind. Earlier today I posted a blog entry titled Can IT education bring an end to the recession? I used a quote that is attributed to a series of Chinese curses that go in ascending order of severity. After I used it, I pondered on the other two curses and their applicability to IT services.

According to Wikipedia, the three curses are:

• May you live in interesting times.
• May you come to the attention of those in authority (sometimes rendered May the government be aware of you)
• May you find what you are looking for

These curses have no time frame attached, so they could be true yesterday, today or tomorrow. The first curse about living in interesting times is very true for most IT shops. The challenges never seem to end but the funds do. The business requirements are fuzzy but the support requirements are real. What makes for interesting times in your role and your organization?

The second curse could be attached to information security services. It most assuredly should apply to those who employ botnets and trojans for unrighteous financial gain. The most recent reports of trojans and bots that can dynamically alter web pages during a banking transaction are very scary. Fortunately, information security professionals are aware of the threat and are working on addressing it.

The third curse may be applicable to those who support networks and need to answer the ever present question about “why is the network slow?” It seems like we are always pressed into identifying the reasons for slow application and service performance without having the toolset to do proper diagosis and troubleshooting. It then becomes a challenge to find what we are looking for.

Maybe IT is a cursed profession after all. What do you think? Is there a more cursed profession?

Thanks for reading and let’s continue to be good network citizens!