Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Ask and ye shall receive...

I got an invite today in the mail from the HR department at work. It is an RSVP to attend the annual "Service Awards" banquet. For us office workers, it means that we have been employed by the RTA for a number of years evenly divisible by five.

This is my fifth year of working at the RTA. I have to say that it is the best job I have ever had. The strangest thing is that I kinda asked for it.

I used to work downtown for a law firm as their IT manager. I handled all the day to day maintenance of the servers, computers, phone system and the like. I even did more mundane things like court running, serving papers, refilling the copier, processing the mail and all that jazz.

While I worked there, I noticed a lot of activity at a building across the street from the building I worked in. Someone had bought the old, decrepit building and was doing a complete refurb on it. I didn't know who was doing it, but they were doing a great job of it.

I went to lunch one day with an attorney friend and on the way back to the office, we passed by the building on Third Street. We had to stop at a traffic light and I was able to get a pretty good look into the second floor window. A second floor room with lots of server cabinets.

I immediately thought to myself, "Boy, I'd like to work in a place like that. Lots of infrastructure to take care of."

Within a matter of weeks, I was contacted by a guy from a company who was desperate to get someone that knew Windows networking to maintain a couple of companies. His current guy left to pursue other interests. I was desperate to get out from under 'Frank'*. So, we hooked up, I got hired and went to work with the clients that he was desperate to service.

One of the clients was a company south of town that was owned by a Japanese conglomerate. They made glue for the auto industry and there were a lot of Japanese personnel there. This is where I picked up a few choice naughty Japanese words and first came into contact with the Japanese version of Windows.

The second company was the RTA.

Strangely enough, the RTA is the company that bought the downtown building that was being refurbished and the company that had the server cabinets on the second floor!

I have actually worked for the RTA for six years: one year as a part-time contractor working for the now defunct company I left the law firm for and five as a real, live employee.

After the company went under, my current boss immediately hired me in to be a permanent employee in the position I was working in anyhow.

So, I guess I asked for it.

My boss says that he only expects five years of work out of a person. Well, I'm not ready to leave. Sure, I have looked around to see what is out there and what the prevailing wages are and compare that to the pittance I make now. But, I have it pretty good where I am. We have great insurance, a great retirement plan, the salary isn't bad and me and Chris get away with absolute murder. Plus, my boss is pretty great, too. Ah, who am I kidding...I'm too lazy to look for another job!

I will never forget the first time I met my current boss those six years ago. He had planned a little verbal quiz to test my skills. He is a skeptic, which is great really, and doesn't necessarily trust everything any salesman says to him. In the case of my former boss from the now defunct company, this was wise.

He asked me if I knew what a RAID was.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. A way of protecting data on a set of hard drives by using more than one, either striping the data across them or mirroring.

After I gave him the five-minute explanation, he had no more questions for me. :) I guess he must have been satisfied with my answer.

I'm just glad to be out from under 'Frank'*.

* When you think of 'Frank', envision Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. Then you will understand.

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