I had my usual Friday afternoon one-on-one with the COO today. We're about to embark on a major upgrade to one of our mission critical applications, and I had discovered during testing a few days ago that the instructions from the vendor are not exactly accurate. What follows will probably sound like so much technobabble to a lot of my readers, but if there is an existing Citrix installation on the workstation, it needs to be removed before upgrading, and for whatever reason this process just wasn't working properly. I uninstalled the existing clients—per the instructions—on a couple test machines and after rebooting and installing the new client I discovered that the machines were still referencing and trying to log into the old server. (What a surprise!) Anyhow, I didn't want to mess around with rooting out this crap, so the quickest way to fix it was to just reimage the problematic workstations—all of which were my predecessor's craptastic builds and overdue for a refresh—thereby eliminating all references to the old client since it wasn't part of my standard image anyway.
I reported my findings to the COO and the other stakeholders. Enter our outside network consultant who is of the "Scripting, scripting, scripting!" philosophy and promptly proceeded to woo the COO with promises that everything could be handled with a login script—even after hearing about the problems with the client not completely uninstalling. "I can bring in a Citrix expert at x-dollars an hour who will get that sorted." Well, knowing this consultant, I knew if this didn't work I would end up cleaning his mess by reimaiging everything anyway, so I told the COO, "I may not know scripting, or the arcane aspects of Citrix, but I do know desktop, and this is a clear-cut desktop issue that I would feel much better handling manually. You'd be a fool if you didn't leverage me here."
She was a bit taken aback that I actually dared to question the consultant's promises (who, only a year ago she had asked if I thought he knew what he was talking about) and countered with, "Can you get it all done in time for the rollout without any overtime?" I said I could—because I'd already started on it, and the half-dozen machines I'd already swapped out were working perfectly.
I honestly don't know why I even care about this, other than I don't want to get stuck cleaning up yet another huge mess that I had nothing to do with creating.