IT Sucks Podcast

IT Sucks Podcast is produced by Burgess Technology Services, a company whose day job is supporting businesses in Maine with their IT and network needs. That job shapes everything here. Most of the voices belong to the firm itself: owners, account managers and engineers, with Tamara asking the questions in the anniversary conversation with the owners. The tone is friendly and conversational, closer to a staff-room chat than a technical briefing, with room for tangents and a self-deprecating aside about doing math on the fly. Company history gets real airtime. For the firm's 40th anniversary, Tamara sits down with owners Mike Doerr and Matt Rice, who remember customers asking how they could be infected after buying antivirus, and how the bad actors sometimes simply moved faster. The same conversation revisits the 2016 rebrand from Burgess Computer to Burgess Technology. It also notes how the recording setup has changed, from three people around one microphone in a small office to everyone joining from their own spaces. A second anniversary sit-down turns to account managers Maggie Cano and Anthony Terrano, who took on work the owners once handled alone. Anthony has presented at trade show events for municipalities and credit unions. Here he recounts the reasoning behind the clumsiest scam emails: they are built to filter for exactly the people most likely to fall for them. Nostalgia surfaces too, with the firm's anniversary social posts reaching back to Furbies and early web browsers. Staff spotlights make up another strand. Network engineer Micah Simmler, whose father also worked at Burgess, talks about days spent onsite, the patient work of moving clients to Microsoft 365 and getting their staff comfortable with OneDrive and SharePoint, and why printers remain the bane of tech support. One example sticks: a Microsoft update that clashed with a copier driver and crashed machines on every print job, right in the middle of tax season for tax clients. Some episodes take their cue from the time of year. With deer season under way in Maine, Matt Rice, who started hunting at eight, talks hunting technology, from cameras that can cost three or four hundred dollars to the seasons beyond deer: spring and fall turkey, coyote, grouse and bear. A holiday episode on nonprofits has Mike and Matt discussing grants tied to specific equipment such as a copier or laptops for program staff, discounted hardware through TechSoup, and the limits of refurbished machines. It ends with an appeal for anyone who enjoys grant writing to offer that skill to a local nonprofit. Outside expertise arrives with Dr. Frank Appunn of Thomas College, a professor of cybersecurity and project management, who describes two ways into the field: technician work on routers, switches and endpoints, or a computer science grounding that leads into cyber. He calls closing the gap in trained people a large task for Maine and the United States. Taken together, the show offers a candid view of what IT support involves for Maine businesses and organizations, and the firm invites questions by email.