Office Space

So this is my first job with an office. It isn't an office per-se, more of a taller cubicle with a door on it. I don't mind in the least, it's still an office. It didn't take long to learn the way things work around here. The way the interview was setup, giving me one day to respond was pretty much a foreshadowing of the way the rest of the job is going. I didn't have administrative privileges for the first week, since the network administrators hadn't added me into the administrative group. One of the P.C. techs did it for me.

I get support tickets which I respond to, and they're usually trivial things like "this computer is running slowly." The first couple of times I ran anti-spyware programs and registry cleaners, and in the end there wasn't really anything wrong with the computers except that they're old and hardly ever get rebooted. I made a program and called it "SpeedBooster". It has a button to start, button to cancel, and a progress bar. When you click start the progress bar moves. That's it. I just tell people to run that and it'll speed up their system. Placebos are great.

For the first few weeks, I was worried about screwing up and losing my job. I eventually realized that nobody really knows what they're doing aside from the P.C. techs. We have a network administrator that couldn't get Remote Desktop working from work to her home computer because her I.S.P. told her the wrong I.P. address.

My boss keeps coming up to me with support tickets and emails from a week ago and telling me I need to address these issues. I then tell him "I did. Last week." On January 24th he came up to me with an email dated the 16th and told me I needed to fix it. I pointed out the date and told him it was from the week before. he insisted it was a new problem. I went all the way across campus to talk to the guy that sent the email only to have him tell me what I already knew, that it was from last week.

The other techs I work with are pretty cool, and 2 or the 3 are stoners. We get a half-hour lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks which we'll usually combine into an hour lunch. We have 2-way radios for when we're out of the office, but they hardly ever work. We have better luck reaching each other via cellphone.

We have an office party once per month. I guess to improve morale. There isn't anyone I work with that I don't like. There isn't the same gossiping behind peoples back that you see at restaurants. Everyone helps each other out. This is the way a business should be run.

I like this job.