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Even Dirtier IT Jobs
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan offers up 7 'even dirtier IT jobs' in a follow-up of last year's 7 dirtiest jobs in IT. Number four? Zombie console monkey.
'Wanted: Individuals with low self-esteem and high boredom threshold willing to spend long hours poring over server logs and watching blinking lights on a network console.'"
cmdrtaco's toilet slave.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's already slashdotted, and i'm apparently the first poster...
Website maintainer after being /.ed would be #8
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Staring at a console? Ewww. Ever heard of GroundWork?
...or Quantum mechanics at work. By publishing this story we can't now read it.
/. editors won't implement it, why not a user with a bot looking for fresh stories and doing a ~1st post linking to cached copy?
Why can't it become routine to (also) link to a cached copy?
If the
When you look into your children's eyes and wonder what will they wear, eat, buy their books and toys from, somehow you feel you can do less-than-dreamlike jobs.
It's not pretty, but it beats being unemployed - and being responsible for a family.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Puts a whole new twist on the old zombie mantra:
Zombie: Braiiiins! Need more BRAIINS!!!
Employer: Yes, you do... your work experience is attrocious!
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
And, perhaps, fulfillment can come from sources other than work...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
My nomination: A PHD (Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher) in Google's TiSP Program.
Ive had a job like that before. I worked as a consultant on wall street and i have to tell you it was by far the most boring job in the universe, if i ever do something like that again i will pay let me say it again pay someone to shoot me, thats how booooooring that position was.
When you look into your children's eyes and wonder what will they wear, eat, buy their books and toys from, somehow you feel you can do less-than-dreamlike jobs.
I have two boys and couldn't disagree more; I just beat them and gamble away my wages.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Dirty IT job No. 7: Disconnect/reconnect specialist Wanted: Able-bodied individuals with affinity for adapters, plugs, prongs, and dongles; willing to crawl under desks and squeeze into tight spaces that have never seen daylight. Strong stomach required. Disconnect machines from one site, reconnect them at another. It sounded so simple Garth Callaghan couldn't quite believe someone would pay his company, 127tech, to do it. Now he employs three full-time employees and 30 contractors, who spend half their time unplugging and replugging machines for commercial movers in Richmond, Va.
Doesn't sound difficult, until you've got someone with a B.S. in Computer and Information Technology who reattaches the cables running down the front of the desk (why are there holes in the back?), thinking it's a job well done.
I had to ask myself this question the last time I was crawling through an underground crawlspace below a very old building so I could run drainage tubing from our new server room.
That was pretty dirty.
I used to work for a company that developed Data Processing applications. There were dozens of them, all of them did basically the same thing, but were written completely different and shared very little code(yep).
The company paid a few select people to sit and stare at the screens to make sure the application did not disappear while running, or have an error. If either of those situations occurred, they just click the shortcut on the desktop to start it up again. I guess for $14/hr it is not a horrible job...but I always felt bad for the people that had to do that.
When you look into your children's eyes and wonder what will they wear, eat, buy their books and toys from, somehow you feel you can do less-than-dreamlike jobs.
I have two boys and couldn't disagree more; I just beat them and gamble away my wages.
=Smidge=
I don't want to call you a bad parent or anything, but the way you're wasting your kids' potential is appalling.
Those kids could be out hustling on the street or working in an illegal textile mill and providing you money to gamble with. Instead, you waste time and energy beating them when the factory foreman could be doing it and paying you for the privilege.
Zombie console monkey...
Finally, a job that really COULD be replaced with a shell script.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Next time: the world's seven wettest oceans!
Meta will eat itself
For those who think "poring" in the summary is a typo, you're not as smart as you think you are.
http://www.google.com/search?q=poring+pouring
One simple rule for its versus it's
Data miner?
Sounds awfully like data mining except for the blinking lights on the console but rather the status output of your data mining software.
And people ask me why I won't have kids...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Taken "offline for maintenance", i.e. applying a plunger to it after it got Slashdotted.
This is what they get for spreading a story over eight pages.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
At least data "mining" conjures up an image of dirt or dirtiness, even if only figuratively. Frankly, I don't see what's "dirty" about poring over server logs unless it somehow involves finding pr0n.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
When you look into your children's eyes and wonder what will they wear, eat, buy their books and toys from, somehow you feel you can do less-than-dreamlike jobs.
I have two boys and couldn't disagree more; I just beat them and gamble away my wages.
=Smidge=
I don't want to call you a bad parent or anything, but the way you're wasting your kids' potential is appalling.
Those kids could be out hustling on the street or working in an illegal textile mill and providing you money to gamble with. Instead, you waste time and energy beating them when the factory foreman could be doing it and paying you for the privilege.
Exactly, no one wants a child prostitute that's already beaten!
If I see this on Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, I'll give it a reason to be dirty.
Sig? No thanks. I don't smoke.
Well, I can't RTFA, because it's probably slashdotted, but I have done some stuff in my career, which would make a lots of folks hurl. Like, looking at Unix kernel dumps caused by bugs in the TCP/IP stack or network device drivers . . . or deadlocks (register four has the PID of the process holding the lock, unless the code grabbed the lock on an interrupt).
At any rate, a lot of folks would abhor doing such stuff. I found it challenging, but fun. Some of the folks that I worked with would have rather just looked at blinking lights the whole day.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
N/T
Your employer is blocking your access to this information to stop you trading up.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
For a month or so, I did this as a temp job. My job consisted of manually logging into a server every two hours and manually running a command to gather log files, and then another to send those files to a second server. I honestly have no idea what kind of system I was logging into, I just know that I was told they were unable to automate the process, so there needed to be a warm body to run the commands. For that, I got to sit in a windowless basement data closet with no access to TV, radio, or open Internet. At least it was a paycheck, and I got to catch up on some reading, writing, and sleep.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Moral of the story: don't ever have children!
So are you saying that your only alternative to naked, starving and illiterate kids is a night shift job as bestiality porn site QA engineer? I think most people have more pleasant, even though lower-paying choices. I just looked at my kid's eyes and I think, if it comes to that, she needs a sane dad more than XBOX360 or a 4 bedroom house.
Exploitation begins at home. - Unnumbered Ferengi Rule of Acquisition
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
This hypnotic voodoo you describe is the reason I don't have kids.
But I'm willing to adopt any desperate 17 year old girls down on their luck.
Hey, we can't all have careers at Google. Sometimes when you work in IT, you have to hold your nose and hope for the best.
Last year we named "The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT [1]," but we barely scratched the topic's grime-caked surface. In the world of technology, there's plenty of dirt to go around.
You may be ordered to crawl into the nastiest corners of your office -- or to explore the nastiest corners of the Web. You may be required to stare zombie-like at a network monitoring console, waiting (possibly hoping) for the alarms to go off, or be chained to an endless series of spreadsheets and Word docs, looking for minute differences in data. You may end up berated, belittled, or sobbed at for circumstances that have nothing to do with you.
And at some point in your IT career, you will probably be asked to spy on your fellow employees -- or even your boss -- and fearlessly report what you find.
[ Have your own tale of dirty duty in IT? Share it in our forum [2]. ]
These seven jobs are not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. But they're out there; in these dark economic times, you might consider yourself lucky to have one of them.
Dirty IT job No. 7: Disconnect/reconnect specialist
Wanted: Able-bodied individuals with affinity for adapters, plugs, prongs, and dongles; willing to crawl under desks and squeeze into tight spaces that have never seen daylight. Strong stomach required.
Disconnect machines from one site, reconnect them at another. It sounded so simple Garth Callaghan couldn't quite believe someone would pay his company, 127tech [3], to do it. Now he employs three full-time employees and 30 contractors, who spend half their time unplugging and replugging machines for commercial movers in Richmond, Va.
But don't think they don't earn their money.
Most businesses have been in the same location for a long time, says Callaghan, and many of their employees haven't budged from their desks in 5 or 10 years. That can make for a rather mucky experience.
Occupational hazards include dust bunnies the size of basketballs, displays coated in soot, keyboards with enough food lodged in them to feed a small third-world country or, in one recent case, caked with a viscous layer of cosmetics.
In the three years his company has been in business, Callaghan and his crew have probably unplugged and replugged 10,000 workstations. But one in particular stands out.
<!-- pagebreak -->
"One day a couple of years ago, one of my crew members was struggling to get some cables loose from between a workstation and a wall," he says. "I said, 'Don't worry, I'm the owner of the company, I'll take responsibility if the cable breaks.' I grabbed the cable and started to shimmy it up. It wouldn't budge. Finally I yanked really hard. Out popped a bottle of Italian salad dressing, three-quarters empty. It had leaked all over the wall, the desk, and the computer. When I looked at the label I saw it was two years past its expiration date."
Callaghan says that while the experience did not put him off Italian dressing, it will be burned in his memory forever.
"My entire crew has to shower down after our job," he adds. "It's not quite 'Silkwood,' but sometimes it feels that way."
Dirty IT job No. 6: Data crisis counselor
Wanted: Empathetic individual able to withstand long bouts of unwarranted abuse; soothing phone manner and low blood pressure essential.
When disaster strikes and critical data goes down the memory hole, it can generate a gamut of unpleasant emotions -- tears, depression, guilt, hopelessness, and rage.
[ For more on the grimy side of IT, see the original
Sounds a lot like something like this.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
assuming you didn't have them as replacement organ farms in the first place
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Websites that make you browse to a new page to they can bump their page views to advertisers can rot in hell.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I don't see any problems with that job.... Why so dismissive? It's not as if you're the person blowing the horse or being taken from behind by a donkey. I'd object to that, but doing some QA on perverted stuff? Pffffff....
And, perhaps, fulfillment can come from sources other than work...
It had better. Most jobs get tedious in a few months at most. And thats for the better ones.
These don't even scratch the surface of dirty IT jobs..
One place I worked, was an old office building where the local servers were in the basement. This proved to be less than ideal when the sewage line became blocked and backed up. The basement flooded with a nice concoction of human processed cappucino and designer sandwiches, from the innards of our trendy young dot-comites. It was some while before the flooding was discovered. As sysadmins our job was to don the biohazard outfits and save the servers and disk arrays. I should add that it was summer.
Sorry, but most of these jobs are not that, "dirty," compared to my last job. I did systems administration work for a meatpacker. This meant that several times a year I would go to feedlots and slaughterhouses to help out with the systems. There is nothing like working in a place where you can be walking on guts and dung as you go up and down to the computer rooms. (And by, "rooms," I mean, "modified coat closet with an air conditioner sticking in a hole cut in the wall.") Some of my favorites:
-One abattoir had the intake for the server room on the roof... directly under the exhaust tower for rendering. Even when we moved the equipment into the new offices, I turned on the disk array and got a face full of rendered pork from the fans.
-One place in Texas was a nightmare. Imagine extension cords stapled to the wall for systems, where they were wired so the pronged end was the, "hot," side. Yep, it could double as a cattle prod if needed.
-Communicating with the people at these places was impossible. One night crew person sounded exactly like Boomhauer. It was always fun trying to understand her.
-Other people didn't like the fact that we in IT were generally smarter than them. I got one woman who liked making up big words to sound more intelligent than she was. On one occasion, she said that her screen was, "tricating." I had to ask her a few times to repeat the word to understand it. After I found out that she meant that the column size for her green screen console was wrong, causing the lines to wrap improperly, I told her I had never heard of that word before. "Oh, you're young," she said, "that's why you don't know it." Yeah, neither did Merriam and Webster, and they're pretty old, too.
-Another plant in the south had an adjacent, "smoking room," in someone's office, so the fans were sucking in both slaughterhouse smell and nicotine. Lovely.
-And it was always fun walking on the floors when we had to check out the equipment, since we in IT stuck out like sore thumbs. I remember going to check an electronic scale once and watching these workers with sharp knives cutting things and staring at me. I was thinking, "Why don't you look down at what you're doing with that sharp blade instead of me? You know, that piece of meat that has... an... eyeball looking back at me... oh, boy...."
--Chag
We had one client we referred to as "ECP". It was definitely the dirtiest job in IT. If you can figure out what it stands for, you'll know why we had to call it that and why it was the dirtiest job in IT to maintain that website.
Here's a hint: Extreme. Close-up.
I do 45 minutes of work a day, then read slashdot the rest of the 7 1/4 hours.
I did this for several years. I think this one should have been the #1 on the list. There are some things that just cannot be unseen.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
A statement which further reinforces my view that having children signals the end of happy life, and the beginning of some kind of badgered and miserable existence, regurgitating the dregs of ones own aspirations into the insatiable beaks of thankless offspring.
And to think. People bring this on themselves.
May the Maths Be with you!
That "Disconnect/Recconect Specialist" in TFA is a wuss. I've worked in a lab building built entirely on a raised floor. Not just the lab, but the offices and everything. This wasn't actually an IT job, much of the cabling being instrumentation. But we had employees with no concept of modern day sanitation. Have some lunch leftovers? There's a hole in the floor and its closer than the garbage can. It'll do. So now we've got rats. Or. more aptly RATS. And rats don't live forever either. And when they die, other rats .......
There were also a few instances in which I believe someone couldn't make it to the men's room it time.
Have gnu, will travel.
Because life is all about you?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
that, or it's further proof that you just can't get laid, and this is your excuse.
Good thing for you, your parents did not think like that, eh.
I work in a shop cleaning repairing and checking out communications systems for oil rigs and boats. Some of the crap that comes back is ridiculous. Thick layers of crude oil and deisel, the rotten smell of crew boats and the occasional dead rodent make the day go by. But hey, I get to play with robots to so it makes it all good.
sorry for my comments, I'm drunk
And paradoxically, it seems to be difficult to get a job when you're unemployed. When I didn't have a job I felt like I was begging for a chance, so I got a job at an cable company/ISP helpdesk. Five months later I got a job as an embedded software engineer (what I was looking for).
It was a pretty lousy job, when I came home I felt completely empty. You get verbal abuse, everything from people who don't know the first thing about computers, all the way to undisguisable idiots. Still, I can advise everyone to do it for a while. You get a lot of people skills, and you get a lot of direct feedback from people struggling with technology. This is invaluable when you start developing these things yourself, as your mental image of the end-user is is less self-centered. It has helped me staying very alert about intuitivity and consistent mental models.
PS: the verbal abuse was sporadic. People call for help, and most of them seem to be aware that yelling first and then asking "can you help me?" isn't very productive. If you really want to thicken your skin, get a job at the payments helpdesk, not the technical one. If you can help them, you also receive a lot of gratitude.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
That's a ridiculous argument, akin to the "well how would you feel if you parents had an abortion" nonsense. If my parents had decided not to have kids, I wouldn't be around to regret it, so I wouldn't feel any worse off.
Save the world they said... Tropical Island I was told....
"I could prove a large percentage of senior management did no actual work at all" This is news?
So, when your choice is making a living wage as the night buy doing QC for a porn site, or working at McDonalds or the corner Gas Station... you say hell yeah Fast Food because it will keep you saner?
So, when it is a choice between your kids eating and not eating, not whether or not they get an XBox, how tasty does that porn based job look now?
My current boss is a shit. I'm paid $8.25/hr to repair laptops all day long. Not just replacing boards, but replacing power adapter ports and more when necessary, as well as software issues. I'm in the US of A. Sure, being the QC for a disgusting porn site would be crap WORK compared to what I do now (satisfying work, crap wage)... but I've walked a path few choose to walk. I've seen the choice of "DO work that keeps you sane and go homeless due to lack of money" and I embraced it. I lived in a van for more than a year. I'm going back to living in it. I don't get paid enough to support living, and I don't have the schedule that allows for another job, there are no third shift jobs here, and I can't find another job. I'm not the spouse of a Marine, which is what 95% of the jobs in town are geared for, since this town is a support system for two Marine bases.
So step down from the pedestal you are on. it isn't the difference between nice and extravagant gifts that we are talking about. It isn't about an XBox or a 4 bedroom house over a 3 bedroom house... it is the choice between homelessness and a two bedroom apartment for a family of 5 (mom and dad in one, all three kids in the other). if you really think it is all about having the money to afford a new console, or making due for one more year with the old one, it is time you woke up. Some of us have to make due with $16k a year. Some of us who work those jobs that fit into your quote "I think most people have more pleasant, even though lower-paying choices." don't make a fraction of what is needed to survive... not thrive, just survive.
And do you really think working as a dish dog at Applebys or Outback or Longhorn or TGIF or any of those places is really a "more pleasant" lower paying job? How about working fast food? Again, is that more pleasant? What is your frame of reference as to Lower-paying and Higher-paying? What pay range caps the "Lower-paying" scale?
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Any of these sound okay to me. As long as I'm just about never working more than 40 hours a week (30-35 preferred) with some time off besides (doesn't even have to be paid time off), decently-paid (not that much, really, by urban standards), and don't have to move out of low-cost smaller-town middle America? I'm game. Low levels of office politics and irrelevant meetings would be bonus points.
This is not a serious article. This is a spoof of the more irritating tasks a Network Administrator (or related titles) has to do. If co-workers didn't need a reboot specialist, half of us would never have made it this far.
Parthogenesis is pretty much an unknown concept in mammals. (Of course, this assumes that the OP is a mammal....).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Click here: http://www.infoworld.com/print/70002
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"He said a couple of teenage boys had broken into his home and surfed gay porn on his computer, and now he wanted to know how to get rid of what they left behind," Grimes said.
I really love this little excuse the CEO gave; the scary thing is I've actually have had people made very similar excuses to me and my co-worker whenever we found porn on their system. Like someone really going to break into your office or home just to view porn and make you look bad
Well if they didn't "bring this on themselves" fairly soon there wouldn't be any people left to complain, or do anything else.
...and I have been avoiding calling him. I'm supposed to congratulate him, but I know damn well he's destroyed a really nice lifestyle he had going. I tried getting drunk enough to sound happy, but then became frightened that I'd blurt something heinous.
I wish I were better at lying.
Being Larry Ellison's date is conspicuously missing from that list. Does /. run on Oracle??
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Yes, I had this in mind exactly, but I failed to explicitly say it in my post: screw career - a warm, loving family where everybody feels protected and safe, that's way WAY more fulfilling than a career.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
A statement which further reinforces my view that having children signals the end of happy life, and the beginning of some kind of badgered and miserable existence, regurgitating the dregs of ones own aspirations into the insatiable beaks of thankless offspring.
Of course, if nobody cares about you or depends on you then noone will miss you. It's so simple to do, just not establish those deep bonds and your life is carefree. If you got run over by the bus, a few friends, relatives and coworkers would attend the funeral, shrug and say "terrible shame" and get on with their lives. Noone would cry for you, noone would call out your name, noone would reach out for you in the dark wishing you were there. No kids means you can just split up, take out a divorce if necessary, and go your separate ways- You never have to worry about my kids and your kids and our kids, you've never got commitments deeper than those you can just break away from. It's also an empty life. I want my life to have mattered to someone other than just my selfish self. Not like go down in history but having deeply touched the people closest to me.
If I ask a girl out on a date I could become happy or sad, but if I don't my heart is just empty. They come in equal measure, if I didn't care much about the date it'd be small and if I was madly in love with her it'd be great. If your boss asked you to write a big and important piece of a business critical software you'd feel pride - and worry. Your solution is say "Can't I just work on this little insignificant piece? That way anything I do won't really matter". and of course you can. Here's what you're missing about most parents I know - they're full of love and full of worry. They wouldn't worry unless they loved their kids, it's the positive love that is the source and the worry is just a reflection. I would surely like to have someone that would have such a special place in my heart, including the rough times.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wanted for position as Slashdot Editor: Individual with poor spelling skills, no journalist background, and weak memory. Ideal candidate has foaming-at-the-mouth Orwellian fantasies about "rights", rabid Linux advocacy background, and atheist bias. Apple and/or Obama fanboy a plus. Must absolutely have zero graphical design skills (we will check). Inability to optimize JavaScript preferred. Good candidates are those that put their feet up on the sofa during documentaries. Apply online.
Advice: on VPS providers
I'd think the camera maintenance guy would find it worse.
Can you imagine the director dropping of a camera for you to fix and finding a big smear of donkey juice on the CCD and horsecrap in the lens fitting?
I don't think I could deal with that.
So you're saying that I should have children in order that, upon my inevitable death, they shall be struck so great an emotional blow that they will keen and wail piteously in futile despair; all for the benefit of my own personal requiem?
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
May the Maths Be with you!
Computer ate my first response...
So, when your choice is making a living wage as the night buy doing QC for a porn site, or working at McDonalds or the corner Gas Station... you say hell yeah Fast Food because it will keep you saner?
So, when it is a choice between your kids eating and not eating, not whether or not they get an XBox, how tasty does that porn based job look now?
Everything is a trade off, I think. I have to agree, personally I'd have put it in terms of healthcare and a non-leaking roof, not an X-Box or other toy. When you have kids, as many of those 'responsable' types on TV and writing advice columns, you do what you have to do to take care of your kids. If that means being QC for gay midget porn or a garbageman, so be it.
Still, where the line varies from individual to individual. There's a reason that clerking often pays less than fast food, despite the dress code requirements for the office job. Once the essentials are paid for (food, medical care, housing), then you have flex about taking a job you like over one that just pays more. For example, my mother took a lesser paying part time job so that she could get home about the same time as my brother and I when we were young. But we never lacked the basics.
Personally, I think that job pay depends on three factors, on average. Difficulty, Danger, and Nastiness. Note that while being a doctor is less difficult physically than being a logger, it's very difficult to meet the educational requirements, thus it's a very difficult job to get into, equaling more pay. Danger, well, loggers and fishermen get paid more than the skills would otherwise demand because the job is dangerous. Nasty? Well, garbagemen are paid a lot for just collecting trash, because it's unpleasant. Other than that, you get some modifications because sometimes it's more about perception than reality. Supply and demand, etc...
What's all this mean? It might be MORE difficult at first, but becoming knowledgable will likely allow you to get a job with sufficient compensation without the unpleasantness.
I don't read AC A human right
Yeah, it's not as though you are physiologically incapable of bearing children and so would require the assistance of a human female or anything...
... worth reading again particularly when you note the closing comment:
"...sorry about posting as AC, but I have a rather unique handle I've been using for quite a few years..."
Reading it myself I have worked out who the author is:
1) Multi-Level Marketing
2) Dirty Job
3) Unique handle
Hmmm who here on /. could fit that profile.... ?
"...His moniker originates in the Dave Barry book Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week..." - CmdrTaco!
Sounds like it's time to pack your van and move to California. We are paying $20/hour to the cheapest handyman we could find and have to book his time weeks in advance. Home based daycares run for about $900/month, so you could beat your current salary just by taking in two children. Even with moderate IT skills, you should be able to do way better. Heck, if I could find a trustworthy programmer with basic skills to work on my own ideas 40 hours a week, for 3 times your salary, I would gladly hire him/her as a hedge against my regular day job.
I did plenty of "dirty" things, but the most memorable must have been the four weeks spent in the server closer, watching a network analyzer to try to understand why the router would randomly go down.
It was in a huge car dealership, so being in the closet insulated me from the douchy car salesmen that poked fun at my (company) car (one of those tiny jap subcompacts) each time I came in or went out. However, I got my revenge on them plenty of times, since they were expressly forbidden to use e-mail for personal reasons (this was when ISDN was kick-ass).
Eventually, I surmised that it could be logical that the router would go belly-up whenever a big turd of a joke e-mail with 20 pictures attachment (at one time, there was even a 2 megabytes mpeg!!! I never thought I'd see such a big e-mail!!!) went through, so I started to watch the mail server logs and queue too.
This had the added benefit that I could exact sweet revenge when I catches a salesmen in flagrante delicto of using e-mail for personal purposes, so in many case, I was able to call the boss and he would fire on the spot the salesman, sometimes even before the e-mail went though...
Unfortunately, this was not the reason the router went belly-up, and eventually we found it to be a firmware error. And although the router manufacturer was glad for us to find what caused that particular bug, we got no goodies from them for me sitting a month in that closet and finding their bug...
Who is this Noone fellow? Sounds like a very caring individual.
Au contraire, Mr Freak. It is so easy to generalise. I'm sure there are plenty of folks who, as you describe, lament the abandonment of "freedom" for a life of drudgery and commitment. My suggestion to them is to turn off the playstation.
For years I had dreaded the possibility of a partner falling pregnant. Then it happened - not much changed until 9 months later. The moment I looked into my newborn daughters eyes whilst sitting alone in the quiet maternity ward, I had a profound experience. I realised that this wasn't about me, a hedonistic rock musician, it was about US, a family.
Everything I've done since then has been for US, including forging an enjoyable and successful career in IT and building a house with my bare hands. I love spending as much time as possible with my three children, and hope that I influence them in a positive manner.
Sometimes, under the right circumstances, in the right places, you can make more money being unemployed than doing a low paid job, especially when you have kids.
The Final Cut
Like being able to clothe, feed and house your kids? Yep, being able to choose a job that personally excites and motivates you while giving you continued opportunity for personal growth is more of a luxury than most (young, single, probably still supported by their parents) people seem to realise.
When I was 15 I got dragged along on a family trip to India, and having to spend a month in that hole taught me a lot about not taking life for granted. There are people there whose entire job, sunrise to sunset, is to sit on the side of the road near a quarry and bang rocks with other rocks to make gravel. They can sell 14 hours' worth of gravel for enough to buy a simple meal of rice. That's what I think about any time I'm feeling that my current job is "unrewarding" or "not challenging".
Well, there was that one time when I had to maintain a ColdFusion web page for nearly a year, and only stayed because the hand-cracked-gravel market where I live isn't profitable enough to afford instant noodles on... but that's another story.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
...and how about the cost of living in California?
I never really knew what the words "unconditional love" meant until I had my daughter when I was 33. The only regret I have is that I didn't have kids sooner.
Hm, I found this http://www.infoworld.com/print/32937 link to be more printfriendly.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
During my brief stint in the US Army, I realized a lot of things. One of the most important of them was this: It's possible to make a lot of money in the military, but usually only as a civilian.
Others here suggest leaving town (perhaps the whole state) and moving on to grander places. I have the following suggestion:
Find a local contractor who does some manner of small electronics work for the Marine base, and work for them. If you've got skills adequate to successfully do even mundane board-level repair on a laptop, then you've got patience and mindset adequate to troubleshoot and fix all kinds of military/government communication and networking systems.
I do this, as part of my current job, for a DOD installation near here. My pay rate is a little more than double what yours is in an area of Ohio with a relatively low cost of living. And when a laptop breaks, I generally pass the project on to one of my lower-paid associates...
Since 9/11, the area of security and communications (both private and public) has been rolling in cash. In the midst of a recession, the company I work for is having its best year ever.
And, though it seems unorthodox, most of the clients that I do work for are happy to see me come in late and work in the wee hours of the morning, because any interruptions I cause them during those times aren't as critical as they would be during the day when there's more stuff going on. And dress code? Hah. My hair is long, I wear a beard, and my clothes are clean -- that's the extent of the expectations in this field when you can actually get stuff done.
Food for thought, I guess. I just hope you don't end up back in a van. :-/
Kid-proof tablet..
If your kid has a 4-bedroom house, then you are really spoiling them. A beating or two wouldn't go amiss, just to balance them out.
Yes, this is how I live my life, by how many people will rock up to my funeral. I think you maybe filling your life with illusion, one step away from those who use material possessions to make their lives complete.
And actually wanting your kids to cry for you and call out your name when you are dead, is a little sick? Does that really give you pleasure???
I've seen it all. Porn where you go "does someone REALLY beat off to THAT". Porn where you go "can someone even keep a hardon when looking at THAT". And of course porn that makes you go "Dave, don't come in, you might slip on the barf pizza".
Believe it or not, you get used to it. You should detach yourself from your emotions in some cases, but after you're done becoming basically an emotionless automaton you can easily impress your friends when they show you some shock page like meatspin or lemonparty and you shrug it off and enjoy your burger while watching.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When I didn't have a job I felt like I was begging for a chance, so I got a job at an cable company/ISP helpdesk. Five months later I got a job as an embedded software engineer (what I was looking for).
It was a pretty lousy job, when I came home I felt completely empty. You get verbal abuse, everything from people who don't know the first thing about computers, all the way to undisguisable idiots.
Yeah, well most embedded software sucks, so you probably deserved it.
Sounds a lot like the job the goth guy in the IT crowd is doing.
This list must've been drawn up by someone who has only ever worked in very cushy jobs in the IT industry. none of this stuff is particularly shocking, oh no dust old ranch dressing on the cable you barely have to touch, some other companies coming in after you to hand clean all that mess up, not to mention the horrors of actual bodily fluids anyone who's worked in a hospital has to face. This whole article reeks of spoiled rich kids.
I keep falling into IT generalist roles for small/medium size companies and have had to do all of these at one company or another...
The funniest was the porn thing, working on a project for an Interactive Hotel TV company, their systems were basically a PC with the screen transmitted to the guests TV in their room. We usually had to fix the PC's by clearing all the porn out and then the malware etc before we could actually think about the project we were working on.
My personal favourite, the relatively inoffensive 'Fat F**k of the Month' - people get off on the weirdest stuff.
Also ran a web team with a porn links site. My personal favourite there, just for the sheer nicheness of it - 'Jizz on my glasses' . com
I currently have a second desk stacked with old computers that should really be given away, but to save money I have to try and recycle them.
I regularly have to 'clean' users data as they are incapable of using excel without destroying the contents.
I have to look after a server cabinet in a room off a kitchen, I don't like touching the floor, i would rather crawl under peoples desks all day...
I had to console a boss who lost all his data because he 'didn't trust me or the server with sensitive company data' (makes ya glad to work in such an exalted trade) so stored it all on his PC and never backed it up. I had to console him even more when I got a quote from a data recovery company and it would cost £1500 (he was a tight wad - except when it came to buying himself cars) to get the data off his dead HD.
I have also been asked to trawl through peoples browsing history for proof of naughtyness. I don't like contributing to people loosing their jobs but perhaps they should learn a bit more about how computers work so they can cover their tracks a bit better...
When I first started in my current job, it was normal procedure to move computers when the individual moved desk. I got bored of moving computers after 3 weeks and stunned everyone with the idea of roaming profiles! It goes a little like this.. 'I need to move desks, can you move my computer for me?' - me:'You just log into the computer at your new desk', 'no I want all my documents and short cuts on my new machine' - me:'WTF?'
Think thats all boxes ticked...
insatiable beaks of thankless offspring.
You know there was a time "You" were the thankless offspring. So now where are you? A Thankless Adult.
Yeah, because that's what the country needs...more slugs in the wagon riding along for us working saps to keep pulling.
On behalf of all us taxpaying, working individuals and families....Fuck you very much.
WTF? Over?
I apologize for the ambiguous pointer :-). Currently things are going pretty well, considering the stakes. A recall of an embedded product is quite costly, but there are other people our customers can yell at when things go wrong :-).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Noone would cry for you, noone would call out your name, noone would reach out for you in the dark wishing you were there.
Why would you want something like that? I really do want for no one to care ... in the big picture, it's all the same in the end. A hundred years from now it would be like I never existed. All my thoughts and troubles, all my dreams, will be all gone.
So why should somebody else suffer for me? It's clearly not beneficial to them, and it sure won't bring me back.
As soon as someone has served his purpose (read: raise offsprings) Life will discard him. And if he didn't have any children, no problem, he will not have passed his genes. And nothing of value was lost, right?
is the spammer. the one that works in a legitimate email marketing firm. he knows that what he does is bad, but he doesn't have a choice. money are pouring out of this business. a lot, trust me. as long as there is someone who will click on my offers, i will continue to send them. i have no soul. :(
You know, you keep saying "I" when you argue your reasons for having kids. I'm being serious... wanting to matter to somebody is no reason to have kids. It's not a good reason. Neither is just wanting them. THAT is selfish.
that, or it's further proof that you just can't get laid, and this is your excuse.
yeah, you're right. i'm married.