Every walk of life has its unsung heroes – people who do not get as much limelight and recognition and pats on their back as they should for a job well done. In newsrooms and news organizations, it is always said that journos and reporters and writers and correspondents and all those other people in the business of writing stories always hoard all the attention at the expense of editors and sub-editors –people who make things happen from behind the scenes, but never get noticed. The typical newsroom also has another class of unsung hero; the guys in the IT department. These IT geeks are the chaps we shall blame and call all sorts of names for any malfunction involving the newsroom computers in particular, and all other IT-related business in general. A typical assault on the IT department usually starts the moment power goes off and the UPS system lets off that annoying siren-like sound to signal a power outage. Immediately this happens, nobody will be seen trying to look in the direction of where the nearest REG office is for answers. Instead, everybody now turns their wrathful gaze on the IT team, usually perched at an inconspicuous corner of the newsroom. Just to digress a bit – did I mention REG somewhere up there? That’s right – Rwanda Energy Group. Why do I seem to favour the old name, EWSA over this new REG business? Because in the good old days of EWSA, once a power outage occurred, it was easy to package my ever ready rants in a beautiful rhyming scheme – “EWSA, what’s up?” Tell me, is that not beauty in the rhyme? Moving on, when power goes off in the office, it’s a blessing in disguise: Not only is it a chance to taunt IT, (where you thought the rants would be directed to Rwanda Energy Group instead), it’s also an open ticket to walk out of office to embark on the business of killing time: These may include; smoking a cigarette, blaming the employer and electricity authority for general sloppiness and not caring, and back-biting the IT chaps. But the woes of IT chap are even worse when it’s the internet connection that has either shut down or slowed to a turtle’s pace. This should be easy to understand, bearing in mind that the average office worker with access to a computer and connection spends more office time liking random status updates on Facebook, hunting for desperate soul mates on Badoo, and thinking up/coining status updates in the hope that they will attract a myriad likes and comments and, hopefully, thrust the owner to overnight social media stardom. It is in light of this crippling mass addiction to social media that whenever the office internet connection stalls, the IT team now becomes the butt of “internet-less” jokes and insults, so to speak: “Where are these IT guys, and what are they doing?” Then the killer: “What are these guys (IT) paid for?”
