The final countdown

It's been a while, but the silence is over. These days my job has had my complete attention. I found that even my downtime was focused on not thinking about my job which meant it wasn't fully released to leisure. Today marks day two of my final week at my current job, and I couldn't be more excited. I turned in my two weeks last week to pursue a new opportunity with an expanded role in a smaller company. Thank gawd! I learned a lot of technical widget skills at this job, but the thing I learned that I value the most is how to be a professional and see a task all the way through to the bitter end regardless of whether or not I think it's a losing proposition. Well, and that I want to work in a small shop with less demands. I'm not interested in forfeiting half of my oncall duties running configuration errands for other business groups. "Sorry it's such late notice, but we need to do it now or the business will lose thousands of dollars. You weren't doing anything Tuesday night at 1 am were you?" I'll just reschedule that appointment I had with my bed.

I keep getting asked why I'm leaving by my management, and I believe their questions are genuine and my answers are heard. Since it's on my mind I'll let it loose on the blog, too.

I work in I.T., specifically in infrastructure, and I'm a fan of making changes to the network during a maintenance window, but it's cruel and unusual to state the time and periodicity of such a window and then say, but if it's X enough (important, embarrassing, a VP has a burr in her britches over it) then this change can happen at the whim of the requesting party. There is some need to be this flexible in this business. The only problem is this back door policy doesn't scale well. In a company of thousands of employees with hundreds of business groups the potential to be called upon to make a change whenever one is watching the network is large. Which brings me to the next point. In my opinion oncall personnel, one who is available to repair a problem after hours, should only be notified when a device or service isn't working that this individual manages. Since I work with infrastructure technically everything touches my equipment in some way so I can expect to receive a page at two in the morning for a problem regardless of whether or not there's any evidence to support that my equipment is even breathing heavily much less broken. Here's an analogy: Bobby is expecting a package via UPS and it doesn't arrive. He contacts UPS. When the UPS service rep says he doesn't know what happened to the package, rather than escalating to the service rep's manager Bob thanks him for his time and calls the Department of Transportation. Clearly the package was lost somewhere on the road and it's the DoT's lot to figure out where and get it back.



I'm told at the new job that there is a window that is kept sacred. Nothing is to be manipulated outside of this window beyond break/fix issues. Also, the network is much smaller so it follows that I'll receive less after hours notifications of broken stuff. Honestly, I may never shake the UPS/DoT problem, but I've been told that my new help desk staff is very helpful and is expected to do the requisite troubleshooting to assign problems to the right place. That alone gives me a warm fuzzy.

I'm looking forward to my week off in between jobs. Originally I was going to quit in the middle of the week so I negotiated to start on the following Monday with the new job, but my current boss said it was fine and that I could make Friday my last day. The funny thing is that I don't own a computer. I haven't owned one since college. I've always just used the laptops that I've been issued through work - not the smartest thing when it comes to privacy, but I'm not checking out porn so it's mostly kosher. The long and the short of it is I'll be disconnected for nine whole days. I have a groovy iPhone so I have access to e-mail, but I'm not going to be composing any long ass narratives on that touch keyboard. It gets the critical jobs done, but it's no substitute for a full computer. I haven't spent this much time without access to the Internet since I was aware of the Internet AP (After Prodigy). I look forward to it. I'll be forced to write with a pen and paper which is just weird and tiring, but I'll also have plenty of time to read and knit. Maybe I'll get some more work done on the old bike and de-winterize the new one. I imagine by day four I'll either find myself in a Zen-like blissful state with birds landing on my shoulders to bask in my healthy warm aura, or I'll be clawing my way through a Best Buy clutching my credit card determining if I want to go for the investment machine or the cheap quick solution. The Wii has a browser... Is that a little drool hanging from the corner of my mouth?