'Looks like you have an ID-10-T problem!' - Photo by Ross Sheil

Have you ever called an information technology (IT) worker for assistance and several hours later he arrives at your desk, shakes his head grimly, and tells you, "It looks like you have an ID-10-T problem"?

If you have, then you should sack him (IT workers are invariably male), joked one government IT worker.

Regular workers and their IT colleagues are a world apart. While the former tend to know little about the machines that make office work possible, the latter can exploit, and to some extent also suffer, that gap in computer literacy.

Security tools

IT workers usually have their own offices and communicate with the outside world and IT colleagues elsewhere by instant messenger; software that the rest of us are usually blocked from using by a myriad of security tools.

These tools include firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware software, proxy servers, filters, gateways and patches, while the rest of us only understand, and sometimes forget, our more mundane 'password'.

The nerds are almost as secretive as the Freemasons. Such was the shocked reaction when another IT worker was himself informed of a hypothetical ID-10-T problem.

"Who told you that!" he spluttered.

IT workers, whom we now know even make their jokes in code, apparently fear that similar breaches in security might help us understand their IT secrets. This might reveal their justification for actions (or lack of) concerning our troublesome computers and their troubled users.

The status-quo is that older and less technology-savvy decision makers continue to sign off on purchasing technology which the IT department can safely argue is cheaper (or whatever unquestionable rationale that they choose to advance).

But unbeknownst to those decision makers, that technology might not work so well. Until they figure things out for themselves, those folks in their IT department have jobs for life.

This conspiracy-of-sorts is international.

One 20-something Kingston office worker complained that he had told his superiors weeks before what was causing a fault with some software. While that worker may be an IT layman, he is part of that same generation, which includes most IT workers, which does not type with one finger.

Unfortunately for that company, his superiors bypassed his advice and flew in an expert, from a European software company, who delivered the same advice that doubtless cost more.