Call me annoyed.
I’ve got a 18″ LCD at home and have had it for a while. For such a long while, it only supports VGA – as in no DVI – but it’s OK: I don’t spend much time on my home PC: remote desktop has helped me stay on the couch, while checking email. At work, I have a 17″ Sony LCD. It’s got a thin bezel and a DVI cable, so it’s pretty clear. Rather sharp, in all honesty. Also has an adjustable neck which is key.
17″ is small. Very small, given the amount of stuff I have on a screen at any given time. It’s the nature of development: compiler, bug window, email are all running at once. Bigger screen LCD’s have been on a market for forever and a day… so I asked for a new monitor at work.
The end result? I’m now so very, very close to buying my own monitor at work that it’s really pissed me off.
My options are limited, obviously: buy one myself or live with the 17″.
I was basically told “you aren’t getting a 20 inch or 24 inch [from Dell]”. It’s nothing personal. It’s budget related, I’m told. Even though the 20″ is under $500 and the 24″ is under $900. “You can have this 18 inch from NEC, that is supposed to go to a new hire.” Ah. So the new hire gets a bigger monitor than me? I’ll ignore that. I mean, it was thoughtful, to slide it to me. …but the NEC is only one year newer than the one I have at home: huge bezel, VGA cable, blurry as shit. I mean, I had to get an adapter to plug the VGA plug into my ATI/DVI video card…
Meh.
OK, maybe I can go dual monitor, then? The video card supports it… put the blurry monitor over there for email. …except I don’t have the $20 dongle to do that. I also don’t have a guarantee that that would even work with my the card: the card comes with the dongle but it’s so old already that ATI refused to admit that it existed. Ah, Dell has the part on their site – ironic, since the machine is an HP – so we ordered one of those, to give it a try. At least I might be able to run with one small main screen and one smeared extended screen. Whoo!
Looking a gift horse in the mouth? Maybe, but this gift horse wasn’t of my own doing. I had a pretty slick system at this time last year… Pentium 4HT. Faster than what I have at home. Honestly, it was pretty peppy. I was offered a new machine. I politely declined, saying that I’d rather have a bigger monitor. Besides, it woulda been a cheaper purchase and I would have valued it more… I didn’t need a 64-bit machine. I was doing fine with my P4. I got the machine anyway (and promptly installed 32-bit Windows on it, to avoid driver issues).
Meanwhile, the existing Dell that I had was marked to be replaced with a 64-bit machine: part of a nationwide recall that Dell put out there. I could have participated in this, but I had a minor problem: my current Dell had 1GB of RAM – the new box would have only 512MB… if I wanted to be back at 1GB, we would have to do that on our own. I passed the message around, figured that it would be worth it, getting a new box to replace a faulty one. Of course, I couldn’t get anyone here to OK an additional 512MB to buy. I ended up having to pass on that whole deal. Lost opportunity. Pft.
At the end of the day, here I am ready to spend $500 of my own money because I can’t seem to get enough budget in my own group to spring for a new monitor. And that’s just lame.
I mean, like, hella lame.
Oh I know how it is! Politics and budgets drive me insane. Right now I’ve got a dual monitor setup but one is a 17 inch LCD and a 19 inch CRT. But I can’t have another LCD because “other people would bitch”. Don’t mind the fact that there is a second 17inch lcd sitting right next to me in the lab that no one is using. argh!
Some of us are already buying our own kit – it seems to be a bit of an emerging trend. As I sit here at work, I’m using my own LCD monitor, which was previously connected to the “company” PC. Now, it’s connected to my replacement PC, bought by myself. When I’m out of the office, I use the Dell laptop that I bought. When I need color printing, I use the color laser that I bought.
I develop software using my own copy of Visual Studio (and my own components) and do my word processing and spreadsheet work with my own copy of Office Pro.
I recently audited my PC and the total software bill, should my employers actually want to replace the stuff I’ve bought, would cont to around $12,000 (not including the hardware).
I ring up my colleagues using my own digital, mobile and Skype phones.
Problem is, I’m the only technical person in the company, so the people with the budgets never understand the need for technology. If they can edit a letter in Word on their low spec laptop, why should I need anything better to do a bit of programming???
To be fair, my employers have provided me with a laptop – an old HP (P3 with 128Mb RAM and a 10Gb disk).
If only I didn’t enjoy the job more…
Scary. I mean, I used my own ThinkPad while I was consulting, but because it was easier for me… but that was my choice.
I have to admit that the best “worst” story to date was a job I took with a technology company, as a programmer, and they didn’t give me a computer to work on for the first six weeks. Honest. True story. I thought I was going to have to use an abacus to code in VB. w00t!