Another Shotgun Update

I have a few little things I wanted to jot down while they are fresh on my mind.

First thing is that a colleague of mine, "Paul" was fired from his job Monday. I was talking to him just moments before it happened. While I do not know exactly why he was fired, I have my suspicions. In the interest of fairness, I will not blog on what he *may* have been fired for, but after talking to the head of security, I am partially correct. All the head of security would tell me (and he was not obliged to do that) was that if he would have "manned up" to what he did instead of lying about it, then he would not have lost his job. He would have most certainly been reprimanded, but he still would be working.

My TL came into my office yesterday and asked me how comfortable I was with the NetApps filers we use. I was honest and told him the only experience I had was the class 7 months ago. I have not logged on and done anything since. The whole technology is very foreign and I have trouble grasping it.

My TL then said that he hoped that would not be a problem for me. It turns out that the week of the fourth of July, I am the *only* admin working. It seems that all the other techs are taking that week off. I realize that being low man on the totem pole will cause me to draw the less appealing assignments, but I am still a very junior admin. Many of the issues we face are way over my head. Looks like God will be working overtime that week to help me...I will never be able to do it alone.

I like my TL, but he confuses me. I am not sure why he authorized all those people to be off at the same time. He also has an interesting way of "training" people. I received two tickets the other day and I asked him for assistance on them. After I went home, he completed and closed one of them and left the other open...in my name. He did not offer any explanation, nor did he send me an e-mail. I confronted him in the afternoon (he was offsite a bigger part of the morning) and all he told we was that all I needed to know was in the /admin/docs folder. I know where that folder is, I had already read the 'work instructions' but I was still lost. The ticket needed me to do user admin on a Citrix server, something I had never done before. Once I confronted him, he walked me through it. He had to refer to the documentation as well, but he showed me how. I went back to my desk and after a few false starts, I think I did what our customer asked for. I am just waiting on conformation.

While I was walking little man this morning, I noticed a HUGE pile of plastic totes by my neighbor's recycling bin. Many of them were labeled "electronics" and were being sent off to be recycled. I was nosy and sorted through it in the dim early morning light, hoping to find some small item that I could use. Since it was dark, I gave up looking until I was ready to drive to work, when I had more time and light.

When the time came to go to work, I drove by the pile and realized this was a lot of stuff. He had several motherboards and cases (most were not in good shape at all), a large assortment of SCSI hard drives (4.3 gig and smaller), routers, KVM boxes, power supplies, software, etc. He even had a mini rack. I had considered taking that, but it was not exactly what I was looking for.

Reflecting on the huge stack of stuff he was throwing away, I realized he is as big of a packrat as I am...maybe bigger. If I had that much stuff, I would have made a server or three :) and junked the bigger part of it. I have two totes with stuff in it and a spare case. One tote has keyboards, mice, and cables while the other had the pci cards, hard drives, optical drives, floppy drives, and networking stuff. I usually keep 2 of each on hand for emergencies and as I get newer, I junk the older, more outdated stuff. This guy had enough to set up a small lab. There were 4 totes and 3 boxes, plus a couple of monitors and the mini rack. I guess since he is moving that it is time to clean house. If it is still there when I get home, may be I can sort through some of it.

Our Sarbaines-Oxley (SOX) audit is going well. I have been told that things are looking pretty good. I am happy about that. I do not like audits at all. I just do not like being scrutinized when I am doing my work. Human nature?

My boss has made a mandate that we can no longer work from home without prior approval. While I have not had the opportunity to do much of this, I would like to be able to in the future. It seems that some of my colleagues have been abusing this and he wants it to stop. He told me that he had no problems with me working from home if I desired. I really cannot do that too much, but I appreciate the offer, nonetheless.