Previously On Bread Line

With Arms Wide Open.

That’s exactly how I’m taking my job “redefinition” Why, you may ask? Because TOG is gonna get paid. That’s right, I’ve got myself a new job. I’ve been working with Dr. Hale doing some finite element work on a space-based telescope for the last month, and I can keep the job straight on through next May.

Same money, better hours, less stress.

I’ll be working both jobs until they can find somebody to replace me, at which time I hope to wash my hands of all the computer problems of the department. I’m sure you’ll all hear about the intricate details in the coming months, but for now let me ‘splain a few things about me and my soon to be former job

I first got a job two weeks into my first semester, I went in asking for information about an office position, and left as lab assistant. I spent the next two semesters attempting to absorb everything I could about network administration, from the graduating senior who had be maintaining the network for the previous few years. So come June, I found myself serving as the network administrator for the Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Kansas, at 18 years old. The possibilities seemed great, but I soon came to realize why the best and brightest network administrator the department could get was an 18-year-old with no formal training who was only available 20 hours a week.

It was a young IT’s nightmare. The heart and soul of the network was spread out over three servers in various stages of disrepair, ranging from old pinto to disease-ridden abacas. From this I managed to consolidate enough to put the abacas into retirement, this was done basically by cannibalizing older computers off their vital organs. The Faculty and staff computers weren’t in any better shape than the servers. None were newer than two years old, and most were at least four. And there was nothing uniform about them, each and everyone of them a different model bought at a different time from a different company, and each with it’s own set of problems. The bright spot of the experience were the lab computers, 32 identical brand-new computers all full of hope and promise…until you looked under the hood. The 61-year-old lab director had purchased these computers with no input from anyone who had actually seen a computer before. So in the hey-day of Pentium 4’s, Athlon XP 2600’s, with 800,000 computer companies pumping out boxes after boxes of the latest and greatest hardware, trying desperately to get even the tinest of market shares in a drop off the face of the earth market, my boss managed to pay $1800 per box for crappy knock-off machines with Celerons and barely enough memory or hard-drive space to accommodate existing needs. But by golly, we got 24 new 17” flat panel monitors, you know back before they figured out the cheap way to make them and the price was twice as high as it is now. So there I found myself, inexperienced, in charge of six-dozen overpriced and underpowered computers.

Crappy situation? Yes. Insurmountable? No. I’m sure IT guys all over the country face this type of this all the time. It’s the growing pains of constantly changing exponentially growing part of the working landscape. That, I could comprehend and understand, what I wasn’t prepared for however, was the apathy. No one, and I mean no one, gives a crap until it doesn’t work. Right off the bat, I needed help. I recognized that it just wasn’t possible for a single untrained kid to effectively manage what I was given. A wily veteran? Maybe, but not me. So, I became a wily veteran, real fast. ECS wasn’t any help, so I searched the web far and wide, frequented IT professional message boards, FAQ sheets for every piece of software we had. I flew by the seat of my pants, and remarkably kept it all running. I fended off all those internet worms, the plague of the RIAA searching out file sharers, and near constant computer self-destructions that are inherit in every aging fleet. I dealt with it all, and came amazingly still loving computers. But computers were never the real problem.

People were the real problem. Ask any other IT person, and they’ll likely tell you the same thing, computers are fun, it’s the people who suck. I couldn’t buy new equipment because the department chair didn’t allocate any funds, I couldn’t implement security procedures because it would “inconvenience” the faculty, I couldn’t change anything because of what it might do, and whom it might upset. And when you can’t do anything, everything does you. Of course when it came to lab request for special programs and equipment professors “needed” I was at their beck and call, and constantly reminded of that fact. I was amazed that the department could drop 200 thousand dollars to recalibrate a laser that gets used once ever 3-4 years simply to demonstrate the fact that lasers do indeed exist to a bunch of high schoolers, and yet it took three years of my begging and pleading to get a 2,300 dollar server which gets used hundreds of times each day.

In the simplest of terms, the benefits and detractors of every job can be basically boiled down to three things; responsibility, power, and compensation. The basis for every job is your responsibility, to fulfill those responsibilities you should be given the appropriate power, and for matching the appropriate power to the appropriate responsibility you are entitled to due compensation. The balance of these three things determines the base of your job satisfaction. Sure there are other factors like job security and work environment, but those are really secondary to the big three.

And so there’s where the problem lies. I was responsible for all the computers, but had no real power to do anything with them. This situation is inherently stressful, regardless of the specifics. As an engineering student, I’ve got enough on my mind as it is. The amount of stress the job induces was never really worth the crappy $10/hour I earned, but if I didn’t get the money I couldn’t go to school, so I put up with it.

As I write this, my mind keeps coming back to a poker analogy. This job is a lot like playing 7-card stud. Sure I can shuffle my cards around trying to make a better hand, but in the end, with no deck to draw from, you can only play with what you’ve got. That’s a big rule in poker, when you know you can’t win, you bow out. There’s no glory in a graceful defeat, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a crash and burn.

So in the end, I guess I’m bowing out. But to be truthful, I bowed out halfway through this last semester. There came a time when I just didn’t care enough. I’d been pulled out of too many classes to fix a professor’s procrastinated fuck-up, I’d dealt with one too many rich kid pining to be a rocket scientist in some vain attempt to make daddy proud, but most of all, I’d just be told ‘no’ one to many times. I’ve reached a point where the benefits of the job weren’t outweighing the crap I was putting up with.

So it’s off to greener pastures to do something I enjoy, rather than trying to enjoy what I was already doing.