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.'"

Comments

ironic...

[Brit_in_the_USA]

...or Quantum mechanics at work. By publishing this story we can't now read it.

Why can't it become routine to (also) link to a cached copy?

If the /. 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?

I did this

[zaren]

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.

Truly Dirty IT Job

[Chagatai]

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...."

Wimps

[PPH]

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.