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Jan. 8th, 2010 09:42 amThis is going to be a rant about work and will have rather more profanity than you're used to seeing from me.
I had a major freak-out yesterday. I was stressed out about a couple big things, but mainly it was work.
I hate my job more and more all the time. It doesn't make any sense. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing or how I'm supposed to to it. I literally spend about half my time sitting around and doing nothing because all the stuff in the call queue are things I don't know anything about.
Prior to the merge, I consistently closed more tickets than anyone else in the service desk in all three of our staffed offices. I knew how to do the things we were called on to do. I knew my place. I was content. It feels really good to me to go to a job and know that I'm accomplishing things. That I'm worth the money I'm being paid. I'm a good worker. I really am! I'm not lazy; I don't like feeling like I'm slacking all the time. I hate it. It makes me nervous and I feel lost.
Since the merge, I feel that way all the time. There are any number of new systems that we're supposed to be supporting. New fax software. New messaging system. New servers. New VPNs. Six or seven new systems that I don't even know what they do. Plus there are all of our old systems that were supposed to go away and never have that we have to try to make work remotely from places they were never designed to.
We don't get any training on anything. Nothing. We're supposed to talk to our counterparts from the other company and just suck it in by osmosis apparently. Screw that. Maybe that works for some people, and that's awesome. Not me. I don't really like people as a whole. I'm well and truly awful and dealing with the majority of them in any social context. People make me nervous. I need some kind of formalized process of learning how to do things. I am not a 'just wing it' person. I need structure. That's one of the reasons I decided I wanted to work with computers in the first place!
Let me talk about computers too. I hate them. I hate the damned things. I used to think computers would be black and white. That though I often couldn't understand people, at least I could understand computers. They're logical, right? They make sense. Fuck no! They don't make any god-damned sense! In all seriousness, I have no idea how I fix half the things I fix. I have this list of solutions and some vague correspondences to particular problems. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they make it a little bit better, but there's still something wrong and I just don't know why. Sometimes I have no idea at all what the hell's wrong with the things and I just back up all the data and wipe the drive with a fresh image and rebuild. I'm certainly not learning anything about how to fix them.
I used to think that, with computers, there'd be a solid relationship between problem and solution. But there isn't. There just isn't. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to see it. I don't know. Sometimes you can't even tell if a problem exists in the first place! So your computer is slower than it used to be. Ok, is it actually slower? Are you just comparing it to newer faster machines so it seems slower? Is it slower because you have extra software on it that's taking up memory? Is it slower because your're out of hard drive space and there's no room for a page file? Is it slower because you have some virus or malware infection? Is it slow because Windows is old and senile? Is it slow because your user profile is too big? Or is it, like so many of them seem to be, just slow because the great and almighty Bill Gates reached his cosmic finger down from the heavens and said 'Be thou now accursedly and inexplicably slow, infernal machine!'? Because sometimes, that last option is the only one I can think of. There's just no good reason whatsoever.
There's almost no black and white in computers. It's all grey. I hate grey. I want definable, solid problems with definable solid answers. They don't have to be easy ones. I like a challenge. But maybe computers are just too difficult for me. Or maybe it's just this job. Maybe it's just this company, or this network, or these people, or these users, or this corporate culture. I was comparing it to wiring a circuit yesterday when I talked to Moira. A circuit works, or it doesn't. If a computer were a light bulb on a switch, I might turn the switch on and suddenly find that it's taking an extra ten seconds for the light bulb to turn on even though I hadn't made any change to anything and I would call the person responsible for maintenance who would say 'well, sometimes they just start doing that and you can either replace the wiring and the switch or just let it be if it doesn't bother you that much'. Or I might replace the switch, the wiring and the damn bulb and it's still misbehaving because the socket has gone bad. Or maybe the conduit has gone bad and needs to be replaced. Or maybe the wall the conduit runs through is bad. Or maybe the power coming from the power company has changed without any warning and we need a whole different kind of circuit now to use it. That's my job. And add in that, if I call or email anybody else in servers or networking to ask if anything has changed, I don't hear back for days. Days! Once in a while, I'll hear back faster from fellow service desk guys, but not often. Sometimes.
And when there is a solid, black and white, problem- with hardware, say; a dead fan on a laptop- there still isn't an easy fix. Our systems are supposed to have a next day, on-site, three year warranty on them when we buy them. And most of them do. Except some of them where someone fucked up the PO and ordered them without. And others that are too old and the warranty expired. And others that we got as demo units from the manufacturer and corporate folks decided to buy at the end of the trial even though they didn't meet our specs and didn't have the warranties. Arrgh!
So if someone is remote and has a bad fan on a laptop that isn't under warranty for whatever reason, they have to send it in to an office for us to take out their hard drive and move it to another chassis. That was fine in the old office when computers were mostly standardized and we were the distribution center for hardware. We had a ton of laptops sitting around because whenever there was a mass upgrade, we got the old ones back in our office.
Now the distribution center is in North Carolina, and the largest office is out there too, so we have no extra systems in our Chicago office. None! Not even the most common ones. I've emailed the distribution center asking for extras and for weeks have been told that they'll send some out later. They never show up. Still haven't shown up as far as I know. So I have nothing on site to even build a loaner for somebody, much less a machine of the same model to swap their hard drive into. What do I tell this person? That they have to be down for two weeks while the manufacturer replaces a fan? I don't know. I don't know. Usually I"m able to pass it off to someone in the North Carolina office who has a computer to build as a loaner and I make it their problem.
Sometimes I try to pass tickets off to other people because I don't know what to do with them. I send emails to our department list and ask for help. Occasionally, someone takes the ticket. More often, I don't hear back and I ask again the next day, and the next, and then maybe again next week, while this ticket sits in my queue and gets older because I don't know what the hell to do with it. If I'm lucky, I'll check back later on and the problem already got resolved, sometimes by one of the techs at the user's location who didn't answer my emails. I close probably between an eighth and a sixth of my tickets that way. Sometimes more.
Speaking of locations, tickets for people at the North Carolina office, for instance, don't always go to the NC techs. Just like tickets for the Chicago office don't always go to CHI techs. Instead, there are two people each day who are responsible for taking all the incoming calls. Every damn one. Then they work on those tickets for two days while other people are on the queue until they're up on queue again. Every third day. I can't think of a system that could possibly be less efficient without actively trying to design something that's a complete clusterfuck. Why the hell don't tickets go to people at the damned site the user is at? Why am I continually trying to connect to people in NC via Netmeeting when someone who's there on site could walk by and fix the problem in less time than it takes to walk someone through how to set up the damn Netmeeting program? Why!? Why do you do this to us????
Our network is, in a word, fucked. Our offices are connected by VPNs that are continually going down, malfunctioning, failing to route packets correctly, or otherwise failing. We also used to have five different VPNs for remote users to connect to our offices. We're down to two. I think. Maybe it's three or four because I keep hearing rumours of other VPNs that I don't know anything about. Yes, I'm serious; I really don't know. And sometimes the VPNs I do know about work. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes people just can't connect to them from their home offices. I don't know why. Sometimes certain offices aren't accessible from certain VPNs. I don't know why. I email the server team and don't hear back for days. I send tickets to them that I don't know what to do with and never get word back on, and they come back to my queue with a note saying that it's a configuration issue on the computer. Then why the hell do so many people have this problem? And why did it start after you reconfigured the office-to-office WAN connections? Why won't you answer me, god-damn it??? Do you people even fucking do anything all day??? Not that I can say anything on that front. I don't do anything half the time I'm supposed to be working either. I don't know how to. Instead I fuck around on LJ, like this.
*In rereading this, I realized that I haven't talked about things like supporting cell-cards for laptops and smart phone email synchronization that we're supposed to be able to assist with for everyone on any model of phone yet we don't have any phones in the office to do testing and configuration on. But I don't know that I have the energy to elaborate on it right now. It's yet another problem in a long list of problems coming from the fact that our company won't supply us the tools we need to do our damned jobs.
I needed to express this somewhere. Thank you.
The other people who work here seem to be able to manage. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just not an environment I'm compatible with. I was doing great at Ford when I did IT for them in Michigan. I was doing great here at my company before the merge. But I haven't felt like I'm good at my job and that I'm an effective technician for months. I hate this feeling. I hate my job. I'm starting to hate computers.
I think I need to leave. Moira's going to help update my resume this Sunday and I"m going to start looking seriously for work elsewhere.
I'm also thinking very seriously about finally getting out of IT all together and becoming an apprentice electrician. I could be off my ass and working with my hands every day. I could be making a lot more money than I make now. (I've been a help desk tech for six years plus now and I'm still just barely making in the bottom range of what all the websites say pay scale for electricians is.) I've done house wiring and theatre wiring before and I really enjoy it. I enjoy climbing on things and scooting through holes and seeing the secret places of the insides of buildings that no one else knows. I think it would fit me well. I'd need to get in better shape. Stress and inactivity are making me gain weight.
Speaking of which, I do feel a lot better after food last night. After I stopped sobbing, Moira and I went out to Pick 'N Save to get a bunch of junk food which I consumed. An entire stuffed-crust DiGiorno sausage pepperoni and bacon pizza, a bottle of Sprecher's root beer, two liters of grape soda, and a few fresh baked brownies later, I was actually feeling human again. Well, except my stomach; it's still not feeling very human. But I can live with that. (I eat when I'm stressed out. It's a problem, and I'm working on it.)
And I suppose now I need to clear away the remnants of the under-desk keyboard tray Ibroke destroyed last night, pick up the scattered keys from my Type M keyboard that are all over the floor, and get to work. I'll deal with this for a little while longer.
I had a major freak-out yesterday. I was stressed out about a couple big things, but mainly it was work.
I hate my job more and more all the time. It doesn't make any sense. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing or how I'm supposed to to it. I literally spend about half my time sitting around and doing nothing because all the stuff in the call queue are things I don't know anything about.
Prior to the merge, I consistently closed more tickets than anyone else in the service desk in all three of our staffed offices. I knew how to do the things we were called on to do. I knew my place. I was content. It feels really good to me to go to a job and know that I'm accomplishing things. That I'm worth the money I'm being paid. I'm a good worker. I really am! I'm not lazy; I don't like feeling like I'm slacking all the time. I hate it. It makes me nervous and I feel lost.
Since the merge, I feel that way all the time. There are any number of new systems that we're supposed to be supporting. New fax software. New messaging system. New servers. New VPNs. Six or seven new systems that I don't even know what they do. Plus there are all of our old systems that were supposed to go away and never have that we have to try to make work remotely from places they were never designed to.
We don't get any training on anything. Nothing. We're supposed to talk to our counterparts from the other company and just suck it in by osmosis apparently. Screw that. Maybe that works for some people, and that's awesome. Not me. I don't really like people as a whole. I'm well and truly awful and dealing with the majority of them in any social context. People make me nervous. I need some kind of formalized process of learning how to do things. I am not a 'just wing it' person. I need structure. That's one of the reasons I decided I wanted to work with computers in the first place!
Let me talk about computers too. I hate them. I hate the damned things. I used to think computers would be black and white. That though I often couldn't understand people, at least I could understand computers. They're logical, right? They make sense. Fuck no! They don't make any god-damned sense! In all seriousness, I have no idea how I fix half the things I fix. I have this list of solutions and some vague correspondences to particular problems. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they make it a little bit better, but there's still something wrong and I just don't know why. Sometimes I have no idea at all what the hell's wrong with the things and I just back up all the data and wipe the drive with a fresh image and rebuild. I'm certainly not learning anything about how to fix them.
I used to think that, with computers, there'd be a solid relationship between problem and solution. But there isn't. There just isn't. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to see it. I don't know. Sometimes you can't even tell if a problem exists in the first place! So your computer is slower than it used to be. Ok, is it actually slower? Are you just comparing it to newer faster machines so it seems slower? Is it slower because you have extra software on it that's taking up memory? Is it slower because your're out of hard drive space and there's no room for a page file? Is it slower because you have some virus or malware infection? Is it slow because Windows is old and senile? Is it slow because your user profile is too big? Or is it, like so many of them seem to be, just slow because the great and almighty Bill Gates reached his cosmic finger down from the heavens and said 'Be thou now accursedly and inexplicably slow, infernal machine!'? Because sometimes, that last option is the only one I can think of. There's just no good reason whatsoever.
There's almost no black and white in computers. It's all grey. I hate grey. I want definable, solid problems with definable solid answers. They don't have to be easy ones. I like a challenge. But maybe computers are just too difficult for me. Or maybe it's just this job. Maybe it's just this company, or this network, or these people, or these users, or this corporate culture. I was comparing it to wiring a circuit yesterday when I talked to Moira. A circuit works, or it doesn't. If a computer were a light bulb on a switch, I might turn the switch on and suddenly find that it's taking an extra ten seconds for the light bulb to turn on even though I hadn't made any change to anything and I would call the person responsible for maintenance who would say 'well, sometimes they just start doing that and you can either replace the wiring and the switch or just let it be if it doesn't bother you that much'. Or I might replace the switch, the wiring and the damn bulb and it's still misbehaving because the socket has gone bad. Or maybe the conduit has gone bad and needs to be replaced. Or maybe the wall the conduit runs through is bad. Or maybe the power coming from the power company has changed without any warning and we need a whole different kind of circuit now to use it. That's my job. And add in that, if I call or email anybody else in servers or networking to ask if anything has changed, I don't hear back for days. Days! Once in a while, I'll hear back faster from fellow service desk guys, but not often. Sometimes.
And when there is a solid, black and white, problem- with hardware, say; a dead fan on a laptop- there still isn't an easy fix. Our systems are supposed to have a next day, on-site, three year warranty on them when we buy them. And most of them do. Except some of them where someone fucked up the PO and ordered them without. And others that are too old and the warranty expired. And others that we got as demo units from the manufacturer and corporate folks decided to buy at the end of the trial even though they didn't meet our specs and didn't have the warranties. Arrgh!
So if someone is remote and has a bad fan on a laptop that isn't under warranty for whatever reason, they have to send it in to an office for us to take out their hard drive and move it to another chassis. That was fine in the old office when computers were mostly standardized and we were the distribution center for hardware. We had a ton of laptops sitting around because whenever there was a mass upgrade, we got the old ones back in our office.
Now the distribution center is in North Carolina, and the largest office is out there too, so we have no extra systems in our Chicago office. None! Not even the most common ones. I've emailed the distribution center asking for extras and for weeks have been told that they'll send some out later. They never show up. Still haven't shown up as far as I know. So I have nothing on site to even build a loaner for somebody, much less a machine of the same model to swap their hard drive into. What do I tell this person? That they have to be down for two weeks while the manufacturer replaces a fan? I don't know. I don't know. Usually I"m able to pass it off to someone in the North Carolina office who has a computer to build as a loaner and I make it their problem.
Sometimes I try to pass tickets off to other people because I don't know what to do with them. I send emails to our department list and ask for help. Occasionally, someone takes the ticket. More often, I don't hear back and I ask again the next day, and the next, and then maybe again next week, while this ticket sits in my queue and gets older because I don't know what the hell to do with it. If I'm lucky, I'll check back later on and the problem already got resolved, sometimes by one of the techs at the user's location who didn't answer my emails. I close probably between an eighth and a sixth of my tickets that way. Sometimes more.
Speaking of locations, tickets for people at the North Carolina office, for instance, don't always go to the NC techs. Just like tickets for the Chicago office don't always go to CHI techs. Instead, there are two people each day who are responsible for taking all the incoming calls. Every damn one. Then they work on those tickets for two days while other people are on the queue until they're up on queue again. Every third day. I can't think of a system that could possibly be less efficient without actively trying to design something that's a complete clusterfuck. Why the hell don't tickets go to people at the damned site the user is at? Why am I continually trying to connect to people in NC via Netmeeting when someone who's there on site could walk by and fix the problem in less time than it takes to walk someone through how to set up the damn Netmeeting program? Why!? Why do you do this to us????
Our network is, in a word, fucked. Our offices are connected by VPNs that are continually going down, malfunctioning, failing to route packets correctly, or otherwise failing. We also used to have five different VPNs for remote users to connect to our offices. We're down to two. I think. Maybe it's three or four because I keep hearing rumours of other VPNs that I don't know anything about. Yes, I'm serious; I really don't know. And sometimes the VPNs I do know about work. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes people just can't connect to them from their home offices. I don't know why. Sometimes certain offices aren't accessible from certain VPNs. I don't know why. I email the server team and don't hear back for days. I send tickets to them that I don't know what to do with and never get word back on, and they come back to my queue with a note saying that it's a configuration issue on the computer. Then why the hell do so many people have this problem? And why did it start after you reconfigured the office-to-office WAN connections? Why won't you answer me, god-damn it??? Do you people even fucking do anything all day??? Not that I can say anything on that front. I don't do anything half the time I'm supposed to be working either. I don't know how to. Instead I fuck around on LJ, like this.
*In rereading this, I realized that I haven't talked about things like supporting cell-cards for laptops and smart phone email synchronization that we're supposed to be able to assist with for everyone on any model of phone yet we don't have any phones in the office to do testing and configuration on. But I don't know that I have the energy to elaborate on it right now. It's yet another problem in a long list of problems coming from the fact that our company won't supply us the tools we need to do our damned jobs.
I needed to express this somewhere. Thank you.
The other people who work here seem to be able to manage. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just not an environment I'm compatible with. I was doing great at Ford when I did IT for them in Michigan. I was doing great here at my company before the merge. But I haven't felt like I'm good at my job and that I'm an effective technician for months. I hate this feeling. I hate my job. I'm starting to hate computers.
I think I need to leave. Moira's going to help update my resume this Sunday and I"m going to start looking seriously for work elsewhere.
I'm also thinking very seriously about finally getting out of IT all together and becoming an apprentice electrician. I could be off my ass and working with my hands every day. I could be making a lot more money than I make now. (I've been a help desk tech for six years plus now and I'm still just barely making in the bottom range of what all the websites say pay scale for electricians is.) I've done house wiring and theatre wiring before and I really enjoy it. I enjoy climbing on things and scooting through holes and seeing the secret places of the insides of buildings that no one else knows. I think it would fit me well. I'd need to get in better shape. Stress and inactivity are making me gain weight.
Speaking of which, I do feel a lot better after food last night. After I stopped sobbing, Moira and I went out to Pick 'N Save to get a bunch of junk food which I consumed. An entire stuffed-crust DiGiorno sausage pepperoni and bacon pizza, a bottle of Sprecher's root beer, two liters of grape soda, and a few fresh baked brownies later, I was actually feeling human again. Well, except my stomach; it's still not feeling very human. But I can live with that. (I eat when I'm stressed out. It's a problem, and I'm working on it.)
And I suppose now I need to clear away the remnants of the under-desk keyboard tray I
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