New Years Eve
Sitting in my office, near-beer in hand, and living vicariously through pictures of a friends wedding last october. It’s at least something to do. There is supposedly some big shindig going on around here tonight, but I’m not in much of a mood to go find out what or where it is. That and I know how large crowds of people can be, especially soldiers. That alone makes sitting in the office all the more worth it.
It’s 2005 now, though it’s still 2004 for my girlfriend, who i’m talking to right now. Ahh, isn’t time fun.
It’s now 6pm, 1 Jan 05. Another work day looms in front of me. I have about 15 computers to do maintenance on tonight, and for at least the next 7 nights. Joy…
My sister sent me about a 10 pd. tin of goodies. I got fat just looking at it hehe. The whole thing is being shared to my section. There isn’t a way in hell I could eat all of that. It sure smells good though.
I have my near-beer in hand, and some work to get caught up on. So far, an uneventful day. Just bitchy and demanding users, that don’t realize that they can’t demand certain things from us. BOFH time…
Start point
We’ve been here in Kuwait for almost 3 weeks now. It’s gone by pretty quickly.
I’m one of a few techies running around here to make sure the network runs. I do more of the deskside support stuff now, only stepping back about 6 or so years into my resume. It’s easy, however. It’s so easy that I’m not quite sure why the people who we took over for couldn’t do it.
For the past two weeks, 4 other people and myself have been putting out little ‘IT’ fires everywhere, and dealing a lot with a bunch of ‘users’. A lot of users that happen to outrank my ass…Though, most are easy enough to get along with and will let me work. The others, however, are a pain in my ass, because they want an itemized list of changes done to their machine, a time-frame in which this will be completed, and how it will effect them overall. They act like lawyers…The biggest problem is that a vast majority haven’t the faintest clue as to what I’m doing, even if I take great pains to talk ‘user’ to them. A timeline? I do not give timelines, it’s against the whole nature of the work. How does it effect them? It speeds up your machine, gives me knowledge on where your machine is on the network, and I can manage updates and maintenance from my office instead of waiting for you, the user, to get done surfing for last nights scores.
The task the past week has been to get the maintenance done. Simple stuff, but it hasn’t been done in at least a year. Inventory what we have out there, map it out on a matrix, and gather a list of users.
The part that I’m realizing that the Army doesn’t teach it’s IT force enough is documenting changes on an individual system or the network. We got here with absolutely nothing to go off of. That and the endless assortment of administrator usernames and passwords. How anybody managed any of this is a wonder. But then, it wasn’t managed. Information wasn’t consolidated. People in the shop weren’t assigned daily tasks. They simply ran around and put out fires. They didn’t standardize the builds on the pc’s, know where they were at, manage the IMAC moves. This is self evident in what we’re picking up.
Other news. Kuwait is chilly this time of year. it gets down in the 30′s at night, and rains a hell of a lot more than I remember.
I went to another post north of here, and talk about sparse. I was getting reports of computers only lasting 4-6 months here. Up there in the tent villages the Army has constructed for them, I believe it. With temps upwards of 150 in the summer, it’s not so much the dust getting the machines but the heat.
By the way, here at Arifjan, it’s close to what a normal Army post would be. I still live in a tent, but my office and my offsite locations are buildings with climate control, the works. This place is friggin huge. I’ll post a few pics of how bad it is here hehe.
I look forward to a deployment that is relatively lead-free. I don’t miss my old life that much anymore.
