Grind

I am still intoxicated with the thrill of the entire concept of me having a regular weekday nine-to-five type job. It is a thing of beauty. I'm kinda pinching myself a little here -- I was so not really expecting this.

I'm going to be ensconced back in the training room as I've been, and going to be having a decent machine to work on. I'm going to learn some of the crucial spreadsheets to be keeping things going, I'm going to be working on them virtually un-interrupted (and there is no phone in the room, so I might stay that way) and when crunch time comes around, there is talk of pulling or (*gasp*) hiring me an assistant.

At this point last week, I was unaware that I was being considered for this position. Heck, at this point last week, I was not aware that they'd cut through the "considering" and created the position, much less that they were taking applications.

I am now an Administrative Assistant. (I've been chortling at hcolleen that I've finally realized my longtime dream of becoming a secretary.) While I'm not technically full-time, and therefore I'm not eligible for certain things, this job still has distinct potential for me. And it's a lot closer to home and closer to my comfort zone than dealing with end-users. I was all ready to get out of there when I was a Supervisor stuck on the call floor dealing with phone goons and the occasional angry respondent and that twit what has got more homophobia and "I have to be right" than brain some of my fellow bullpen denizens.

One of the topics at the company meeting the other day was the general agenda for grooming those under us to take our place, and in turn being groomed to move up into the place of our seniors as they move up the ladder as well. It is relatively rare for an open position within the workplace to be filled by hiring an outsider. Yes, we do get outside specialists at high management level, and we get specialists for things like IT, or anything else where someone on staff already can't be found to fill the gap ... but the vast majority of the promotions are from within.

Evidently a promotion strategy like that is rare out in the business world, and I am doing well to have landed myself a decent position there. With my skill set, I could probably wind up in some form of data analyst position, though gods help me if I were wrong about things.

Work is from around eight to four. The position was advertised as ten to five, but we've been doing the early-ish thing, and the eight hours thing. I have yet to exactly work out the break schedule, but it's possible to run on that schedule with little intermittent intermissions for coffee and the restroom and a bite of pear or something (pear seems to be my seasonal fruit of the moment, though I think I've just run out) and not have a sit-down break all day.

I've gone corporate. Send help.

Snitch

I happened to be in the bullpen yesterday when Turbo called for me. I'd submitted a helpdesk ticket about an issue -- there's this disappearing program that he's had to install several times.

He asked me to please keep an eye out for anything I thought might be out of the ordinary -- anything that could cause damage to the program. Even if it was a denizen of the bullpen deleting the program, he wanted me to tell him. "Ordinarily I wouldn't ask you to snitch..." he said.

"I'm IT!!" I said indignantly, then amended myself. "Well, I'm IT in training. But."

He'd known I'd grok it. Ordinarily, the bullpen is a very internally cohesive environment. We stick by each other and cover for each other in the event of other departments being annoyed. However, there are some things that automatically transcend bullpen loyalty, and one of those things is end-users messing with bits of systems that they have no business messing with. I'm geek. There is no question of where my loyalties lie if things go down.

Well, perhaps the bullpen is operating without a clue, but Turbo knows. He wouldn't be asking me to poke at ports on boxen otherwise, even though I didn't quite know what he was asking or how to do it this time. I'd already come up with a list of the machines that were suffering from a particular problem a couple months ago, and I'd filed a ticket about it then. It didn't get through somehow, but I dug it up and re-sent it, and that prompted the further task. I think I saved him a lot of work anyway. There's a bit of a VNC problem. "The monitoring system" still works on the afflicted boxen. (I just learned the proper name for it. Hooray telnet fun.) So supervisors needing to see into an afflicted box are going to have to coordinate with monitors. Joy.

His ghost server is still on the blink, so profiling a dragged-in machine for the training room for me (and getting my recovered data) are both nasty little tasks. Fortunately, I have that spare HD that I can just leave in his custody. (And, since I'm not dumb, my name's on it.)

Hooray, geeking in the workplace.

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Go forth and weekend on, my friends. I have the spreadsheets. Oy vey. But only 1.5 hours more. Then I time out. Religion and computers. Fiat lux compiles.