Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Crazy two-weeks

The last two weeks at work have been nothing short of crazy. I'm not exactly sure what I am and am not allowed to say, so I wont' say much of anything other than the Florida Parole Comission has needed an immense amount of help from us.
Keep in mind officially I am a contractor who's job is to do tech support over the phone with Department of Corrections employees. Phone support is the bare bottom run of the IT ladder.
I have found myself interfacing with the FPCs CIO and networking admin as well as our CIO, head of security and other people in top positions. We also had an outside person from another agency come in to give us a hand. Last Friday was her last day helping us.
She was a really nice lady named Jane. She thought I was really smart. She would say things like, "We have this really smart guy helping us out on this" and things like that. I quickly became the smart guy, which is a tough position because then all of a sudden any time you don't know something or forget something people say, "Oh, the smart guy doesn't know." The good thing is that Jane was always backing me up. There where plenty of thing that I knew that others where questioning me on. Jane would always back me up. She was pretty smart herself. She knew many things nobody else did.
I was asked to work the weekend, but I already had plans to go out of town for Rachel's kid's first birthday. Rachel is a very important person to me and it would going to the birthday party was something that would have been hard for me to miss.
I was in charge of documenting all the procedures necessary to get our work done. This week we e-mailed the instructions out to technicians across the state to get the work done in their respective offices. I have been issued a laptop that is setup in my bosses office and I have been taking calls from the techs answering questions and making sure everything is going well, which so far it is.
Later this week we will roll out stage two of the task at hand which should have the Parole Commission where they need to be and we will be done.
I will be pretty relieved when this is over as every other thing we have been working on has been put on halt. I've got other projects that have just been sitting dormant trying to get this worked through. One of the projects is showing off a Ubuntu laptop I was asked to setup to show them how this whole Linux thing worked. I was really excited about integrating it with Active Directory but I was told not to put it on the network.
I was actually very happy with how well the Ubuntu install went. Some things I find myself having to finagle went without a hitch. I'm pretty excited about showing all that it can do to my boss. Our organization is very MS friendly so the fact I was even asked to install Ubuntu to show it to them is pretty exciting for me. It is extremely unlikely that they will actually choose to do anything with it though.

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