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What Do You Do at Work?
mabhatter654 asks: "With all the talk of 'inefficent' and 'uncooperative' American workers, what do most Slashdot readers actually DO at work? Currently, I'm one of those 'IT' workers at a small manufacturer. Yes, I'm called the 'SysAdmin' but that changes monthly. I'm responsible for the companies network, AS/400, website, PC troubleshooting, phones, etc. But...I also get pushed into other things like ISO compliance, Quality issues, as well as babysitting the shop floor/nite QC on 'off' shifts on a regular basis. Of course, the 'SysAdmin' work suffers...when you spend more than half of your day on other tasks. But that does make me part of the inefficent IT problem that bosses like to talk so much about now days. I'm curious how many other Slashdot readers 'multitask' in non-IT rolls while officially still in that capacity. I'm looking for your 'title', company size, and both IT/non-IT tasks you perform. Also, Does 'multitasking' add more or less value to your position at the company. i.e. the IT tasks that don't ever happen versus helping management in another department? Oh yeah, how about those hours too! How much overtime do you put in and how much of that is due to the other work?"
You're asking slashdot, during the middle of the work day, what we do at work?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
I do my one page-a-day (or more ;O)) at Distributed Proofreaders.
Oh, wait, did you mean what I'm supposed to do at work?
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
My primary tasks include stomping out the various fires that crop up, and making sure our systems are up and available (in spite of the Children in Redmond).
I do a lot of one-on-one support, and fix anything that's broken. I get drafted to fill in the gaps whenever something comes up that we don't have enough resources for. (I just spent a day doing forms data entry, for example).
In my spare time (which varies from 40 to -20 hours/week), I've been spending quite a bit of time trying to plan out a migration to Linux. I'm free to pursue whatever projects I think will help the company. I also hope to eventually move our in-house database from Access 97 to MySql/Apache.
I read slashdot, k5, and a few other sites, to keep a watch out for the newest holes from the kiddies in Redmond. Yes, it counts as work, if I didn't do it, we'd have gotten crushed by things at least 3 times in the past 2 years.
--Mike--
"Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like Im working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too.. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
and that 15 minutes is patching openssh
I spend most of my time filling out TPS reports and looking for the new cover sheet so I can get submitted correctly.
1. Bad signature
2. ?????
3. Profit
I'm working retail because I can't find an entry-level job in IT. Retail is fun, but it's not what I wanted to be doing at 22 years old :P
More than enough BS
read slashdot
No overtime, and the non-IT things that I'm stuck doing are usually sort-of related, like being on the HIPAA taskforce or helping a specific department migrate to an external system, or building a "strategic plan" for our company.
In addition to being a network, phone and system admin, I do custom developing for them too. I enjoy that better than the rest, and it makes me more valuable, I think. So it really depends on what things you're stuck with, how much you like it, and how good you are.
It's all going according to
I maintain a database of half a billion dollars worth of excess aircraft parts using dBase IV for DOS. I also maintain the superfast network of Pentium 133s running Windows 98se.
Yes, I am quite happy when I get home to bask in the warm glow of my eMac running Mac OS X.
Interestingly, I'm having a discussion with my boss's boss who wants to know why we don't get more work done on projects. I've tracked our time and it comes out to about:
His response, predictably, was "Only 50% of time on projects? I can't believe you are only 50% efficient."
So, as a simple solution, we've started using RequestTracker It's a simple ticketing system, and everything in the "Interrupts" list goes into the system (otherwise we don't work on it.) And then each week I give a nice list of all the "other things" we worked on. It's been very useful defending my "efficiency."
...as long as it's not illegal or immoral and he's willing to pay my price. And I'm not trying to be funny.
In the last year, that has included IT security auditing, training on various office apps, database development, needs assessment, small network administration, technical writing, etc.
Title- owner. Company size - one. Being self-employed means plenty of non-IT tasks like bookkeeping and janitorial and marketing and purchasing. Hours? Depends. When business is good, I put in 80 hour weeks. When business is not so good, 40-60 hour weeks. But then I pretty much take off all of November and December and a couple of weeks in the summer.
I love my job. My boss is a bitch, but her profit-sharing plan is awesome -- I get 100% of the profits.
computerlady - a brand new Slash-daughter - alone, but no longer invisible, in the
Then I am a programmer / analyst / business analyst, who has to work with the systems group as well as development group. I trouble shoot hardware, release management, installations, and have to work on other projects and give advice to people who generally don't take it, and then they get upset if I don't take their advice.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I work in aerospace at a big US firm. We still have developers onshore: many of the US government contracts disallow foreign workers for security reasons.
Amazingly, most of my day is not spent working on software, but, on software process. There is all of the overhead involved in keeping our work instructions up to date and our software processes documented so that were are compliant with ISO 9000/1, and CMMI level 5. All of our specs and testing must be formally documented to keep up with DO-178B and contractual obligations.
Because the govt is the customer, there are bi-monthly presentations of our progress, with all the PowerPoint that that entails. The government has their own separate safety team that monitors our team, so a lot of time is spent interfacing with them.
As a consequence we are rather inefficient. To deal with that inefficiency we spend a lot of time in Six Sigma meetings tryings to come up with ways of automating work and creating reusable frameworks. These meetings are truly valuable (see, I'm not totally cynical) but they do take time and require their own documentation.
(The sad thing is that once all this process is up and running, the ISO/CMM documentation makes is so much easier for the company to treat coders like cogs in the machine or to move their jobs offsite. I am so thankful for the government security rules that make my job US citizen only. Whether or not we can keep our California site from moving to Nebraska or some such is another question...)
1300 users, 300 desktops, 8 servers, mixture of windows and linux. maintain website and internal portal.
;)
sometimes i eat lunch too
Where I've worked, IT wasn't regarded as inefficient but I think it's regarded as too expensive everywhere.
I'm used to management hating IT because it's a cost center. Here's what I wish I could tell management:
IT is hard.
You get what you pay for.
I'd like to see some of these managers try taking their car to a cheap mechanic.
IT requires acting almost compulsively, lots of obscure knowledge, and troubleshooting. Then there are the hours.
Troubleshooting is helped tremendously by natural ability, and is not easy to teach. The obscure knowledge requires being enough of a geek to keep up, and the more background you have in how stuff works, the better off you are. Compulsive behavior is a pain for most of us.
I know that the reason I got pulled onto other tasks was that they knew that I'd just Make It Work. I watched a former CIO pulling on cat5e with all his might when he was helping out on a cable run. If you pull on it too hard, it'll probably work, but you sure won't full bandwidth out of it. I often worked on nights and weekends to minimize impact on my office. Backups have to work and be tested. If you don't have backups, you might as well not have IT. I know places like that too, but what do you think of a software shop where nobody is specifically responsible for things like the FTP server, or there are no real backups?
Unfortunately, it's difficult to sell most of this on a resume. I guess that's where years of experience are suppposed to come in, but I know that in many cases that doesn't do it.
Where did you hear that American IT is inefficient? Is this some sort of specific story or rumor? Traditionally, American workers are very productive, and my experience in IT is similar. I know the network architect at one company where I worked saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars on their phone bills by redesigning their telephone system. IT has made a lot of other support staff unneccessary.
I like the mechanic analogy a lot. You can delay maintenance for a long time, and put up with little problems, but ultimately your car will require professional attention. Even for people who buy a new car every two years, maintenance is cheaper than doing none. With a few years experience, a mechanic at a dealership can make 80k.
Almost all of my coworkers in IT have worked their asses off too, even the mediocre ones.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I am a one-man IT department at a Los Angeles-based company with about 150 employees. I do pretty much everything that's even vaguely related to IT.
:-( ), and I'm coordinating the contractors doing this.
Recently, in only vaguely IT-related stuff, I have worked on the renewal of our phone system support contract, figuring out if an upgrade to our phone system is really necessary, and fighting with the phone system people over incredibly bad terms in a contract. (For example, when they upgrade the system from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000, they deliver the upgraded system unpatched (!). I told them to patch it as part of their agreement and they said NO NO NO and I said YES YES YES and they finally bent, sort of[*]).
My main job is to develop and maintain my Linux-based CRM+web ordering system that I developed myself. I want to move it to MacOS X to make security administration easier, and that's been taking a lot of my time. But so has developing new software to communicate with a new distribution partner.
We're also replacing our Exchange server (required because of the Windows-based phone system
Finally, when someone's workstation fails or gets a virus or whatever, I have to help him, her or it out. I am incredibly irritated at all the Windows problems that come up, because they distract me from productive work. If I ran the company, nobody, and I mean nobody, would be using Windows. Ugh.
When I feel overstressed, I calm down by reading and writing on a whole bunch of sites, including Slashdot. Slashdot is also work-related because it alerts me to the worst security holes, new directions in computing I should be aware of, and the like.
Recently, I'd say fully 50% of my time has been spent on supervising contractors of various types, but that's extremely unusual. Most of the time I am working on projects on our CRM system and helping users with problems. But recently there has been a lot of supervision. For the most part, I consider it an interesting change of pace, especially since management is understanding about it delaying the other projects I'm supposed to do.
Except for now, when our Exchange server is being replaced next weekend, there's relatively little overtime except during emergencies. But then again, our business is a 8-3 business, more or less.
Hope that helps.
D
[*] (Yes, our phone system runs under Windows. It's called Interactive Intelligence, and I'll give you a free clue: Don't buy it. Don't argue that it's bad because it runs Windows, even though that, too, is true. Instead, argue that it's bad because maintenance is incredibly expensive, non-responsive and our VAR maintaining it is desperate for revenues. It also appears to require a complete hardware replacement every five years or so, which is not long for something costing as much as a house in a crummy area of Southern California. Because many of the support problems, including quasi-compulsory upgrades, are thanks to the software developer and not the VAR, I cannot recommend buying this software even if you find a better VAR than we did).
When at work and not working (various good reasons, to be sure) I'm working as the infamous DeathKitten, keeping the old marsh clear of trolls and hags!
But seriously, keeping the marsh orderly is hard work at times. *nod-slash-smile*
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I'm supposed to read /.!
(A little bit beyond 'IT', but I do a lot of IT type stuff) :-) :-)
QA Manager
Company Size: 130
Tasks: In addition to setting policy and managing 11 people, I
*frequently set up new systems to support ongoing development and testing
*Eval, procure, configure and maintain various types of groupware tools to support the company's internal organizations (from bug tracking to customer requirements to design docs, etc)
*Eval, procure, configure new hardware for my group
*Write new tools
*Installer development
*ClearCase administration
*Core technology debugging
*Rapid Implementation of new product features
*Run the occasional expert contractor
*Do everything IT for the lab _except_ repetitive processes (backups, for instance)
*Consult on all aspects of the company's business (although sometimes I'm ignored, I see the results of my influence enough to keep on truckin' in spite of that, and I _love_ saying "I told you so" at my overall hit rate of about 80%
*Do whatever else needs to be done in-the-moment. Rock hard in code, be sweet to customers, kick around a few vendors, write docs, dispatch tasks that aren't being done by those who are most efficient to do them.
*Oh, and when I get a chance, I occasionally test the products.
*Basically, on any given day, I kick ass, takes names, put them into a database for future reference.
I multitask constantly, and I do have todo items that are over two years old that keep getting preempted. Multitasking adds more value to my position in the 'task' oriented thing (if I do it, it's generally right), but subtracts from my tactical and strategic capabilities (although I do spend about 15% of my time on 'futures'). But, the 'getting things done' is what the company needs at the moment.
My schedule is extremely flexible- I regularly get in about noon, leave around 9-10 (later if I'm in development mode), work occasional weekends (80% to do something 'proactive', 20% to get 'caught up'). On the flip side, I take off whenever I need to, certain days I only work 6 hours, which balances the other time, and there is a whole ebb and flow of work that follows its own courses, but it's really rare that I ever have to be here when I want to be doing something else (call it 2-3 incidents a year).
I don't "love" my job. I do enjoy it. I "love" other things about my life and try hard to put around 50% of my total 'effort' into those. Needless to say, that list is almost as extensive as my work list.
I'm also paid a bucket of money and stock options (for a presently non-public company hopefully heading to IPO when the market takes off next).
Before you ask, I am an American IT professional. And I happen to agree that most IT professionals don't 'do enough': partly, that they haven't learned how to really focus all that well, only about 50% are self-motivated (which is the only real motivation you can count on in a clutch), that too many work 'for their paycheck' instead of working 'for the company' - the sense of ownership is important, which is why I like the options concept (but feel the way they are run is just a little too slanted towards the company - I'd rather see a dual vesting schedule of - here's the stock that you are entitled to if you stay, here's the stock that you are entitled to if you leave before we go IPO, sort of thing, with the latter being maybe 25% of the former).
*including reading slashdot
As a result, I am responsible for the following jobs:
What's my job title, you ask? "Analyst". I don't know what an analyst is or what I'm supposed to be analyzing, but that's apparently my job title. Apparently analysts don't get paid much, either.
I like the company and the people, but the job is stressful and my todo list is always overflowing. I've brought up the question of hiring more people on several occasions, but I always just get a nod and a, "Yeah, that would be nice."
Hours-wise, I try my best not to work over 40 a week, since I'm on salary and I value my own free time a lot more than I value the company (this might have something to do with how much the company values me, as reflected in my, ahem, paycheck). I pulled an all-nighter just once, and a few late nights to meet a deadline, but that's rare.
Let's see...
. I write delphi code, user interface design and database design for hospital project;
. I write php/javascript/html code, user interface design and database sesign for the web project;
. Server management is up to me;
. I do the network management as well;
. MS-DOS memory optimization (!!!) for the old software (e.g. new machines on client side). I do this because I'm the only person on the company that played games on MS-DOS back in 1994...
. Internal hardware support;
I'm doing some research in colege too... All of that consumes my brain to the last drop and I end up working 60+ hours/week.
It IS insane, but if you take off presure, I like doing all this stuff... don't YOU?
sorry if I can't write good...
\m/
I work as the solitary face of IT in a 50 person charity that runs courses to train people employment techniques (interviews, CVs, finding jobs etc.), and runs a UK Online centre (where people can go use the internet for free). This involves tech support across 4 different sites around the city.
I'd say things are spread out like this:
40% online centre IT: installing software, fixing machines, unjamming printers
20% OLC support: showing people how to use mice (literally), software, and logging people out when they forget.
20% Off-site support: you know, strolling out to one of the other sites, installing software, fixing problems (most of which I don't know about until I get there)
20% Other Stuff: Meetings, e-mail, phone calls, and keeping up with the world of IT.
Usually I do a 20 hour week, although this week I did a couple of all nighters removing some management software from the machines in the online centre, and replacing them with Win2k group policies.
Unchallenged Master of None. And I love it that way. I can always hire or outsource when we do need an unchallenged Master. I get to be the one and only IT person at a small subsidiary to a large financial company. I lay out the budget, make all the decisions on purchasing, outsourcing, business recovery, etc. I do a lot of paperwork for compliance purposes which I kind of hate. I spend the rest of my time training users, acting as help desk, evaluating new products and tech, and trying to keep up with all the security alerts I get from the parent corp. It has been a wonderful position. I love being the "CIO" of a tiny company.
That was the way it used to be. Recently the parent company has taken it on themselves to pull ALL IT functions under one roof. Somebody thought it would be a Great Idea to have one group of people be all things to all business units and subsidiaries. Consolidate to save costs. What a novel idea. It has truly been a nightmare. What used to take literally 5 minutes now takes 2 weeks and requires 800 signatures. It's the most inefficient set up I can imagine. My users are forced to call a centralized help desk that is staffed by inexpensive entry-level folks that have no idea what we do, what apps we have installed, what our business model is, what constitutes a risk, etc. These people are fine, but imagine your company's help desk if they got calls from other companies in different industries. When calls get escalated we get a visit from an upper level Corporate IT person who either
A: doesn't get it anywhere close to right because they've never seen half of the software we use to do business, have not been made aware of the security model, and have never been told what functionality we need.
OR B: They swallow their pride and ask me, so then get it right but resent me for being king of my little pond.
This is true for most departments - their business systems needs are very different from each other.
So where we used to be a fast nimble outfit that took every advantage of current and emerging technologies to gain efficiencies and stay on top of the competition, now we are a slow, backward, bureaucracy driven, lawyer ridden, hack shop that can't load an MS Office template without 2 forms, a signature, a phone call, a ticket number, and a 5 day turnaround time.. And that's JUST for an Office template to print out mailing labels. You don't want to hear about adding forms to our web site or patching a SQL server, or (OMG!) upgrading apps on a desktop PC!
It's a total nightmare. We aren't saving any money. We're much less efficient. The entire dept. is beyond pulling their hair out. The parent corp's Holier-than-thou attitude leaves us with no hope. And just about anything I could do to rectify the situation is a violation of corporate policy.
I went from loving my job to hating it to the point where I'm sick to my stomach in less than 3 months. And it has nothing to do with the efficiency of workers and everything to do with incompetent power-hungry management whose main concerns are buzzword compliance, covering their asses, and of course short term stock prices over long term profitability.
I'm not used to being a bitter person so I'm putting my energies toward getting the heck out of Dodge.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Do you have to clean bathrooms, too?
Seriously, I had a job once where I was told that in addition to our regular duties we would also be cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the office. "Be sure," they said, "to dust the chairs."
Um, yea.. I check this site to make sure no one from work is browsing and posting. Yea, thats it.... And I have to do it often, too. You know, so nothing slips through the cracks.
What, me Tweet?
This reminds me of a big argument I had over compensation, when worked at a big computer retailer back in the late 1980s. I complained that as the only technically-oriented sales rep, I did an inordinate amount of work for the other sales reps, configuring their systems and troubleshooting, etc. and of course they made the sales commissions and I got nothing. I had a small base salary plus commissions, I told the boss I wanted to be compensated for the work I was doing for everyone else, by an increase to my base salary. The boss refused to believe I spent that much time helping everyone else, so I worked out a plan. For a full week, every 5 minutes, I would write down everything I was doing. I had a little timer that went off every 5 min, I took it everywhere except on sales calls. It took a huge amount of effort to record things constantly, but I was out to prove a point. After the week, I compiled the report, and it turned out that I spent more than half my time doing uncompensated work for other sales reps. I was the only rep doing work for other reps, all the other reps solely did their own work. I had proven my point, but do you think I got a raise? No, of course not.
I run a Virtual Private Server hosting company. I'd say my most of my time was spent dealing with people.
That includes answering simple questions for potential customers. And every now and then answering 'hard' support questions which might have me googling around trying to find answers.
I spend a bit of time setting up new servers. That used to take hours per server. Now I've got a personal best of 30 minutes (and that included a fully featured kernel recompile).
Since my server setups are pretty standard and the management of them is pretty much scripted, the day to day management of a lot of servers isn't that much of a handful.
Other than the support and hardware side of things, its a bit of everything: Billing; updating the default software installs; working on the website; adding HOWTOs; finding cheaper/faster/better host servers and network connections; reading the wht forums; new customer setups; answering 4AM in the morning pages; ...
- I fight the company IT department to get the permissions I require to run the software I need to do my job.
- I fight again to gain ownership of the files containing the source code I have to edit to produce the company's products. (It doesn't do anyone much good if the files are set read-only and owned by some administrative function other than me as they're checked out of the revision management system, but that's what IT's default settings did.)
- I fight the undocumented and idiotic conflicts between pieces of Windoze software. For instance, today I discovered that a certain serial port chip-programmer application is completely locked out of the use of a port if I use XP's Hyperterminal on that same port, and I can only use that port with the programmer app again if I reboot Windoze. (Bill Gates, you suck dead rotting donkey cock.)
- I fight the absurd and ridiculous limitations of test software, such as a hard limit of ten messages I can pre-define to be sent on the test bus when I have come to need a minimum of 11. (Even more ironic, the test hardware I'm driving is based on Linux and ought to be way more capable than the crippled Windoze interface I must use to talk to it.)
Talk to me next month and I'll probably have a new litany of complaints. I do thank ghu that I only have to deal with the reboot monkeys of IT rather than generic Windoze lusers, though.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
because IT tends to over-promise and under-deliver. In addition, of course, IT teams tend to be better paid than most, and the stuff we do is hard to quantify - what's the value to the company of an email system ? a billing system ? a website ?
In "Dancing with bears", Tom Demarco and Tim Lister make the point that on an IT project, we're tracking costs to an ever-increasing degree - time, expenses, over-runs down to the cent - but almost never track the benefits. The feature that gets added to the project because the VP read about it in a magazine, the little switch that lets your favourite customer bypass the security system, the 87th report - they may well be hugely valuable, but we just don't know.
Efficiency is not just determined by cost, it's the ratio of cost to benefit. On the IT side, we can controll (some of) the costs, but surely it's up to the business to make sure that the benefit is managed equally professionally.
The lure of off-shore outsourcing is twofold - there's the promise of cheaper stuff, but also the reduced requirement of the business to justify the benefits of their projects and features. Instead of a partnership between the "business" and the IT team, the relationship becomes "customer/vendor", which for many business folk is a lot more comfortable.
In the long run, I believe that - unless you manage the benefits - there is no price point at which you can afford to ignore the benefit part of the equation.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
- Arranged for electrical and phone contractor visits to wire up a room in our office.
- Called local telcoms to price T1s.
- Patched W2K (2x), Office 2K, SSH (2x), and Sendmail.
- Purchased new computers and set them up with FreeBSD (2x) and W2K (2x).
- Split our NIS netgroup to get around the verdammt 1024-character limit.
- Set Nagios and MRTG to watch our stuff.
- Purchased office supplies and a new hard drive to replace one that took a walk.
- Taught one of the new managers how to use CVS (which truly was a case of the blind leading the blind).
- Fixed a bug in the build process (one particular environment variable wasn't getting set during build, but had been statically coded by Yours Truly).
- Attempted to get a handle on what software licenses we need to get, and how much that might cost us.
- Discovered that "Print to PDF" in the version of OpenOffice we have means "Print to PostScript"; made vague plans for upgrade to latest version.
- Tested OpenVPN, found it Good.
- Set up new rackmount switches to replace the zip-tied ones we had previously; half-cleaned up the rat's nest of wiring.
- Moved one guy's home directory to another computer so he wouldn't fill up the partition he was on; made vague plans to replace the old server.
And I love it all. In all honesty, I'm having the time of my life doing all this. Beats the living fuck out of helpdesk.Carousel is a lie!
If the developer cannot do his job, the company has no product and pretty soon neither of you has a job.
If you can't find a way for the developer's tools to run correctly without administrator priviledges for "everything", then your OS is fucked up. Microsoft had an example of how to do it properly (Xenix) in-house before they released Windoze 1.0, and ignored it.
And if two Windoze utilities conflict on your server and fuck it up, you're still stuck sorting it out. Sometimes the tools have bugs. Unless the developer has the source to the tool (gonna get the source to the interface for an in-circuit emulator? how about Visual Studio?) the developer can't control what it does to the system. They still probably have to use it, if for no other reason than it's the company standard. I don't know which is more ridiculous: letting anyone touch the company webserver, or insisting that cross-development source code files on a desktop workstation are in any way equivalent. Making it impossible for someone to do their job will do that; if it's your policy, it's your fault. You really want to make brownie points? Hose someone's computer with some magic update that blows away some essential driver that was working just fine the day before, then make them wait five days to get around to letting them do their job again. (That happened to me too. I don't work there any more.)As for my current situation, I've now got permanent local admin rights on my own desktop. The revision control system works as it is supposed to, I can actually use the editor to edit files, and the various tools are installed and running. The truly sick thing is, everything was working fine for the guy who had the same computer before me... so IT had to know how to set it up properly, they just thought that was optional for me. Is that your attitude too?
It's probably mutual. Today I wish that I could take the Fortune-50 customer for the project I'm working on that's been delayed because of IT's screwups and point them at the people responsible for making me run in circles trying to figure out why my tools didn't work instead of getting product out the door. If there's any resemblance to you, I'm sure it's just coincidence.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I did a mix of maintenance coding and new development. As a member of an internal development team, I gathered information from (internal) customers, formulated requirements, prepared requirements and design specs, and wrote code.
As of Friday, I am unemployed. My full-time job is now looking for a job. I'm also trying to help other Slashdotters who need work. See the link in my sig.
Slashdot job networking at JobCenter
I took a IT sabbatical. I work for a walmart now, as inventory control specalist. Though, I wear countless number of hats. I also unload trucks, stock, pull department manager duites, drive and maintain various heavy lift equipment with great ease requiring operating lisences and a mechanic's wrench to keep things in order. The unloading trucks part of the job does me better than a gym. I am one of the managers' "Ill give it all I got" people and train everyone in my department to be the same. (Now I just have to teach them to think ahead of management without relying on me to do so for them)
I haul around about 20 to 30 1/2 ton to 2 ton pallets for 2 hours with a manual pallet jack and stock for 2 to 3 hours and unload trucks for 2 to 3 hours (depending on other activities). I swear after Q1 of 2004 when I go back to IT work, I will be one of the strongest IT guys with the ability to handle anything thrown at me. I have learned to enjoy the odd jobs as they break up the monotony of things, and told management that fact. Just so long as they realize odd jobs are to break up the regular duties, not the other way around.
DRACO-
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.