Nine-to-Fivers Rage Over the Digital Divide

Remember the days when if you had an email problem your company had an IT department on hand to help fix the problem? Now minions on the company totem pole have to call another state or another country to get some geek advice. The latest Business Week (I know, I'm obsessed with that mag, but I'm really just catching up on my reading) has an interesting story on the digital divide within companies when it comes to tech support.

Witness a new kind of Digital Divide. As large companies increasingly outsource part or all of their information technology divisions, many employees now spend hours on the phone struggling simply to explain their tech issues, let alone get them resolved. If they're not contending with an understaffed in-house help desk, they're working with one in a faraway country to have passwords reset, remote access to servers reestablished, or lost spreadsheets retrieved...

...Senior executives, meanwhile, often enjoy an in-house tech concierge service, says Jeremy Harris, treasurer at New York's Infusive Solutions Inc., a technology recruiting firm that fills "executive support" jobs for companies such as UBS, Warner Music Group, and Priceline.com. The experience of becoming a second-class digital citizen is fomenting help-desk rage, as lower-ranking employees fume about losing productive hours. It can also create havoc for the official info-tech department: Frustrated employees try to find creative ways to get the same instant tech support, often from a friend in the next cubicle, who may not be versed in company tech policies and practices.

Maybe we all should have thought about the repercussions before we chuckled at this series of Saturday Night Live skits in the late 90s.

And if you think one-on-one tech help is the only geek perk a CEO gets, think again.

Elite tech squads may set up equipment at the bosses' home office on the weekend, run out and buy them new BlackBerrys if theirs malfunction, and even travel with them on helicopters or corporate jets to provide instant, on-demand help. The people Harris places in tech support roles tell him: "I spent the weekend setting up their network at their second home in the Hamptons," or "I got woken up in the middle of the night to fix some VP's BlackBerry," or "The job took six hours because I had to set up the boss's workstation and then the kids', too."

One more reason to want to kick and punch your way to the top.