Some of the best lessons are learned from ones first real job. All that schooling melts away under the harsh glare of the real world, what ever that is. Some of the best stories come out of that first job as well. A recent post got me thinking back about my first job doing on-site tech support of a County Government Division. If you are up for a few chuckles and some tips for fixing pebkac errors cause by the id:10-T in cubical 9 read on.

This is Part 1 of a 2 (or 3) part series

background

The office I worked in did research, billing, and investigation on a particular (and ubiquitous) class of people. To protect the innocent, I will not get more detailed, but my office had about 60 workers, 6 of whom were men. Of those, 3 wore loaded weapons to work. It made life interesting. Another interesting result of these demographics was in restroom use. There was a mens and a womens restroom on each floor. The men were expected to use the correctly dedicated restroom, but with 50 plus ladies and three restrooms, the mens restroom was fair game if one of the women got there first.

My job was officially to assist the two other IT staff in maintaining the IT infrastructure. As the newest person there I was responsible for the drudge work: Imaging systems, reseting passwords, initial trouble shooting, etc... The reality was that sense I was not tied up with lots of pressing IT issues like bug fixes and coding, I became responsible for anything that plugged into the wall. This included copy machines, space heaters, and in one case a coffee pot used by those three armed investigators the Sheriff was so nice to let us use. I promise you the coffee pot got right to the top of the todo list.

Is it plugged in? Is it turned on?

By far the most interesting thing I did was to trouble shoot problems. I have a knack for this kind of thing; it is what got me through a lot of physics labs. One of the lessons I learned was to check these to things first. Some people get very embarrassed when this turns out to be the issue, but we should all take heart. My boss who had been in IT sense it was considered a branch of mathematics, still occasionally fell victim to a loose plug or a flipped switch. As it turns out that coffee pot made much hotter coffee when I plugged it in and relocated the new paper shredder.

The System

So what was it that kept the other IT folks so busy? The entire office ran on a mainframe application that kept track of all the people, billings, etc that happened in the office. Sure people wrote documents in WordPerfect, sent e-mail with LotisNotes, and did other normal office tasks, but the vast majority of everyones day was spent looking at a terminal emulator connected to a mainframe in Sacramento. It The System was down everyone usually ended up in the lunch room or out of the office.

The problem was that The System was an attempt to integrate all the counties in California who prior to its existence had each had their own way of doing things. The result was a system designed by lawyers in committee and run by bureaucrats who knew how it "should" be done.

I was fortunate that the extent of my contact with the system consisted of setting up the terminal emulator, and reseting passwords.

End of Part 1