It’s déjà vu all over again as I may soon find myself unemployed once more. Word came down at work that they are redefining my job from being a contracted position to an internal position. The job itself will be the same, but who I directly work for won’t be. As a result I need to apply for consideration to be hired for the job I am already doing. Like most companies these days, they’re very big on their employees having some form of degree, preferably a bachelors. Doesn’t matter what area the degree is in, so long as you have one, your chances of being hired are greatly improved.

Which, of course, I don’t have. I am working on one at the moment, but it’s still some distance in the future. I wasn’t expecting to have it done before my contract expired as it was and I definitely won’t have it within the next few weeks. The good news is that I’m at least being allowed to apply for the job which is a step up from when this happened to me at Ford Motor Company where they wouldn’t even entertain the idea of considering possibly hiring me without a degree. The bad news is my boss doesn’t get to put in a good word for me until after the recruiter determines whether or not I should even get an interview.

Needless to say I’m updating my resume and will be submitting it, but I’m not particularly optimistic that I’ll retain my job. Assuming I don’t my boss has said that he expects the transition to take at least a few months to unfold so I should be OK until at least January at the earliest and possibly as late as March. There’s no guarantee of that, but you take your silver linings where you can find them. In addition to applying for the job I currently have I’ll be hitting the job boards with a bit more vigor to see what other opportunities there might be. The fun never ends.

You walk in and the first thing he does is ask how you’re doing and you explain that you were up to “only” 2AM because you were playing the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion for WoW and without missing a beat he says with a smile: “Oh, surprised you didn’t just call in today.“

Now you might think at first that he’s suggesting that I’m a lazy bum who would be so lame as to call into work just to play a video game all day, but I should mention the fact that my boss, while he’s saying this, is sitting in the office with the lights off and Gears of War 2 loaded up on an Xbox 360. He understands. He knows what it is to be a gamer.

In my younger days I’d be more inclined to take a day off to play a new game I’ve been waiting forever for, but my mastery of my willpower has improved with age and it helps that I’ve been playing the beta since it started so had already worked through some of the cravings. There’s also the fact that I don’t get paid time off so that’s another motivation to get my ass to work.  Besides it’s Friday and I’ll have a good portion of the weekend to devote to playing so that gives me something to look forward to.

OK I need some help here in regards to white balancing digital cameras. This is job related, but due to the NDA I can’t go into too many details. Suffice it to say that we currently white balance digital cameras using a large piece of white foam board (20” by 30”) and we currently white balance each camera individually. We want to be able to white balance two cameras at a time, but that would require double the white foam board and it has to be able to fold down the middle without having an obvious seam as that stops the white balancing from taking place (no, I can’t tell you why). It also helps in storing the white balance sheet as we would fold it up to put it on a cart.

We’ve tried using white paper, but that invariably creases when folded thus ruining it for the purpose of white balancing. So our next thought was to use some form of white cloth. The question is: is there any kind of cloth out there that won’t develop a serious crease that may interfere with a white balance? Is there anything that photographers make use of that may work in this instance? Any suggestions you guys have would be much appreciated.

Our afternoon shift person never showed up yesterday. They called at one point and said they were stuck in a traffic jam, but then we never heard from them again despite a couple of phone calls and voice mails sent to their cell phone. We have no idea what happened, if they’re hurt, or if they’re just skipping out, but for the moment I’ll be working 4PM till 12:30AM until we either hear from this person or we hire someone else.

On the bright side it means I’ll have had experience with all three shifts, but I’m hoping things settle down by this fall so I can plan out what time to take a college class or two.

... no, it’s not job related. Just a mild headache today for no apparent reason. Last week was hell here at work and it kept me hopping most of the time. Things have finally settled down, though, and being back on mid-shift means I can definitely afford to relax a bit more. Now if I can just find stuff I want to blog about I’ll actually have a little bit of time to squeeze it in.

Stay tuned.

In total the power outage last Thursday caused issues with some 53 motherboards in total and I had to touch each and every one of them today. When I got lucky it took nothing more than a reboot to get them back up and running and when I wasn’t lucky I had to replace the motherboard.

I wasn’t as lucky as I’d have liked to have been today.

By the end of the day there was still a good 9 or so motherboards I wasn’t able to get to. Afternoon shift should be able to whip them out, though, and hopefully tomorrow will be a little closer to normal. I was on my feet most of the day and I am a sore puppy as a result. With any luck I’ll be back to regular blog posting tomorrow. For now, I’m going to go relax.

So I’m flying solo this week. The boss and our mid-shift guy, who was originally our morning shift guy but has since taken on a new project that will move him out of being a Tech to being something else infinitely more important, are out in California for training this week. Thus leaving yours truly to fend for himself the entire shift whereas I could usually take solace in the fact that I wouldn’t be alone for more than a couple of hours in the morning before I had others to consult the truly knotty problems with. I am, after all, still relatively new to the job. Needless to say I was a tad bit nervous about coming in this morning.

As it turns out, my unease wasn’t for naught. We have a web tool we make use of that monitors the status of all the workstations on the floor. When I came in this morning the first thing I noticed, to my horror, is that all of the workstations appeared to be down. This sometimes happens after a power outage and can result in a lot of fried motherboards and we did have some nasty weather over the weekend which resulted in power outages around the area. There wasn’t an angry crowd banging on the door to the lab with pitchforks and torches, though, so I surmised that the web monitor must be wrong and it was as most of the stations were up and running.  I put in a call to the boss, who was busy getting ready for his flight, and he logged in remotely to try and do something about the web monitor. Meanwhile Mondays are always a busy morning as a number of workstations lose calibration over the weekend and sometimes need to be rebooted - a function normally done using the web monitor tool which was useless as it couldn’t see any of the workstations.

Still I managed to get enough of the usual problems sorted while flying blind that no one was sitting around waiting for a workstation to be fixed. That’s when I started in on the minor repairs which often require me to physically climb up onto a workstation to reach the component in question. I can’t go into much detail about what it was I was fixing, but suffice it to say that it’s a rather large step up to get to it. Naturally when I went to step back down onto the floor I managed to rip out the front crotch of the khaki shorts I was wearing. Fortunately my Hawaiian shirt was long enough that I wasn’t flashing everyone in the room, but obviously I was going to have to do something about it. So I notified the floor manager and I got in my car and drove the half-hour home, threw on some jeans, and drove another half-hour back to work.

Shortly after I got back to work the web monitor tool decided to start working again, kind of. It’s currently seeing about half of the workstations, which is better than not seeing all of them, but still less than I had hoped for. Of course several workstations since I got back have decided to have issues and most of them are workstations that the web monitor can’t see for whatever reason. This has resulted in moving people around to other stations that are still working. There’s been a few other issues since then that are largely annoyances, but those become magnified in the midst of an ongoing crisis.

For the moment, things appear to have stabilized and a lot of what’s wrong isn’t anything I have the access rights to fix myself. I’ve notified the folks who possibly can and I have to wait for them to do whatever voodoo they do do and then I’ll pick up fixing what I can once I can. Nothing like a lot of stress first thing on your first solo day to let you know you’re alive. At least until the brain aneurysm kicks in.

Started off with sitting in on a conference call where they went over the second 12 page NDA-Plus-We-Own-Your-Soul contract that I had to sign a half-hour before I actually arrived at the new job. Met the good folks on the team I’ll be working with, looks like I’m the old man on the crew again, got a couple of tours of the facility which is very assembly line in its approach to what it’s doing. Got settled into my desk, or what passes for my desk—a couple of folding tables set up in the corner, but I can’t complain because that’s pretty much what everyone has for a desk and it works—and was promptly asked by one of my new coworkers if I had much Linux experience. I said that my webhosts have all been Linux based and that I’ve monkeyed around with it, but that I wasn’t an expert. “You will be by the time you leave.“ was the reply. Which, in all honesty, would be absolutely fabulous.

In order to be able to better support the machines I’ll be responsible for they had me sit down and learn exactly what it is they do. This is where this entry gets tricky because of the NDA. I’m not allowed to directly identify the company I’m contracted to or any of the details of what their process involves. According to the training video I sat through, complete with an annoyingly named cartoon monkey that could only be dreamed up by the tortured souls in the pits of a hellish marketing department, the answer I’m supposed to give when I’m asked what I do for a living is as follows: “I work for a temporary agency scanning documents for a major corporation.“ They actually had a quiz after the training video in which this was an actual question. So I can say that it involves scanning of documents and that’s about it. Except that, other than this first night on the job, I’m not scanning documents at all. I’m providing technical support on the machines for the people who scan the documents. Even given that little bit of info you’d have to be living under a rock for the past couple of years to not know who it is I’m contracted to, but I can neither confirm nor deny it. As the young woman I sat for an hour and a half and watched work told me at one point, “When you say that to someone who knows what city you’re working in the first thing they say to you is: Oh, you work at [REDACTED]!“ Except, you know, she said the actual company name that I’m not allowed to say except to coworkers.

Honestly, I find this whole cloak and dagger NDA stuff to be pretty funny and damned amusing to comply with. They even have an email address for us blogger types so we can send them any entries about work that we may be worried violate the NDA for a second opinion on if it’s OK if we put it up on our blogs. The reason for the secrecy is two-fold: First, the project is somewhat controversial and there’s plenty of people out there—authors and free information types—that aren’t that happy about it. Second, there’s at least one other (that I know of) competing project out there that may be interested in learning more about how this company is going about the project. So I can understand why they’re so guarded about it and I don’t have a problem with complying with the NDA, but it’s certainly a new experience for me.

So anyway, I had to sit down and learn how the document scanning folks do their thing and then I had to sit down at a station and do some of it myself. They have some test materials for training purposes and they had me go through the whole process for about an hour and a half to get a taste of what it’s like. Near the end my boss came over and started randomly yanking cords out of my machine so it would give me error messages that might come up for an operator. He was enjoying that part entirely too much, but it did give me a feel for what some of the common problems were going to be most of which they already provide operator instructions on how to fix, but which might result in me being asked to take a look at the workstation. I will say this about the workstations themselves: How they do what they do is exceptionally clever. There’s a definite challenge to the documents they’re scanning and the solution was very cool, but I can’t say anything more about that.

The rest of the evening was spent restaging the two laptops I’ll be using on the job. One is a personal laptop for use in day-to-day stuff like email, document writing, and messing around with to learn stuff on. I’m encouraged to mess with it quite a bit, restage it often, take it home, and so on. The other laptop is the one that will be used for the serious work stuff which requires it to be very secure. Both are running a very popular distro of Linux, one that I’ve talked about not too long ago actually, but I’m not sure if I’m actually allowed to name it so I’ll hold off for now. If you’re a regular then you probably have a good idea already. I didn’t get a chance to do much configuring of either machine yet as they day simply flew by and before I knew it it was time to go home.

So far so good and the rest of this week looks to be very intense as we get into the nitty gritty of what the job will entail. One bit of good news is that I’m allowed to blog from work during any downtime so I’ll be able to get the occasional entry up. Downtime may be scarce for awhile, however, as they work to get me ready to be on a shift on my own. It looks like after this week I may be on the mid-shift, however, which has a large overlap with the first and second shifts so my solo-time would be minimal for awhile. It’s definitely going to be a huge learning experience that should expand my skill set considerably if I’m there the entire two years of the contract. I’ve definitely got a good feeling about this job and am very happy I managed to land it.

It’s funny how the last day on a job you’re about to resign from ends up being somewhat bittersweet even if the job wasn’t all that great to begin with. At least it seems that way if you’ve got a halfway decent working relationship with your coworkers, which I somehow managed to develop in the almost year that I was there. Most of the team joined me for a farewell lunch today at a local Hooters and we had a good time making jokes and eating food for a bit longer than the standard lunch hour. It’s not that I’ll miss the job itself, but the people I worked with who were a good bunch overall. At the same time I’m still excited about the potential the new job holds and look forward to heading in on Monday afternoon. But for now I’m going to relax and enjoy the weekend.

A small bit of irony arrived in my inbox a couple of hours after I got home from work. The company I was contracted to was Hewlett Packard—via a Massachusetts based contract house named TCML, a company I don’t recommend—and I think I mentioned awhile back that they had announced they would be direct hiring some of the team. I put in an application and ended up not being chosen to join HP, which was fine because the new job came along right about the time they decided not to hire me. I’ve known for a week or so that I didn’t make the grade so it was with some amusement that I received an email from HP today saying:

Dear Les,

Thank you for applying for the position of Field Support Engineer, requisition # 206136. After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we will not be pursuing your application on this occasion.

I had to laugh cause I already knew this. It seemed a silly bit of redundancy considering that I’ve known about it for awhile now and had just quit to go to a different job. Though I suppose it’s nice to get official confirmation of my not getting hired in at HP.

Seems the IT industry is picking up a bit here in Michigan, or at least it seems to be. I’ve gotten a few emails recently with companies that had short-term jobs on offer and if I were out of work I’d probably have tried for one or two of them, but two to six weeks isn’t anything I’m going to quit my current job over unless it pays a helluva lot more than the ones I’ve seen are paying. Last Friday I was contacted by a company that was looking for someone with UNIX and Linux experience of which I have some. I sent back an email saying that while I had some experience I was far from an expert on either OS thinking they’d probably rescind the offer, but it turns out they still wanted to talk with me. So tomorrow I have a job interview in the late afternoon which means I’ll be leaving work early to make it there as it’s all the way back over in Ann Arbor which is south-west -ish of where I’m currently living. Friday afternoon rush hour traffic is notoriously bad so I’ll definitely want to get a head start.

I don’t know if I mentioned that the company I’m contracting to at the moment has offered to hire some of us contractors on internally and they had us all fill out online applications. We’d been told that not everyone would get an offer and today we found out who did and didn’t. I wasn’t one of them. Which is OK because it’s not that big of a step-up to go from contractor to employee. It would have netted me affordable health insurance and the chance to earn vacation time, but not much of a pay raise so it wouldn’t have stopped me from looking elsewhere in the long term. This new possibility I’m interviewing for would bump me up to $20 an hour, still not where I’d like to be, but $5 more than what I’m currently making and should also offer health insurance.

Still just having things show up in my inbox is good call for a bit of optimism. With a little luck maybe I can get back up to what I’m used to earning before another year goes by.

It was only a matter of time I suppose:

Indian Outsourcer Plans Delivery Center in Ohio - Yahoo! News

As Indian service providers get closer to their U.S. and European customers, India’s largest outsourcer, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has set up shop in a suburb of Cincinnati.

The company’s new services delivery center will be its primary software development center for North American customers. Located in Milford, Ohio, the North America Delivery Center can accommodate up to 1,000 staff, most of whom will be hired locally, the company said on Tuesday.

A number of Indian outsourcers are setting up facilities to be in the same time zone and be physically closer to North American and European customers. Infosys, India’s second largest outsourcer, and Wipro, the country’s third largest outsourcer, have, for example, set up IT services and business process outsourcing operations in Monterrey, Mexico. Wipro, which last year acquired Infocrossing, an IT services provider in the U.S., is also planning a facility in Atlanta.

It makes sense on a couple of levels—closer to the people you’re supporting and no complaints by clients that they can’t understand the person on the phone—but it means that techs that work there can expect to make diddly squat in terms of wages. There’s be no point in outsourcing if there isn’t a cost savings.

Link sent in by SEB reader Rich.

For the better part of the day today I’ve had nothing to do. I was asked earlier in the morning to take a shuttle across campus to a building for the sole purpose of turning on a single PC so the build team could launch the build. When I got there the guy who runs the department asked me, “But what about the three other PCs that need to be built?“ Called my RC to find out. Nope, just the one at the moment and she has no idea if the other three will be scheduled anytime soon. I’m used to that so it really didn’t annoy me too much other than having to explain to the fellow sitting there that the process is stupid for stupid reasons and that I, being a peon, can’t do a damned thing about it.

The damned annoying part came much later. After I went to lunch and was chilling out in my car listening to NPR. It’d been a good couple of hours since my last goose chase when my RC finally calls about ten minutes to 2PM. She’s got some tickets for me to do across campus again, can I get to a fax machine. Told her I was in the car and that I’d drive over instead of taking the shuttle and call her as soon as I find a fax machine. Takes about 15 minutes to make the trip, find a parking spot, get inside and find a fax machine. I call her back at her office number. No answer. I try her cell phone and learn the she’s left to go to a late lunch.

Thanks for making me bust my ass to get to a across campus for no good reason. The building I’m in at that point really doesn’t have a spot you can hang out in an inconspicuous manner either so I head back over to the building we use as a home base and figure I’ll take a shuttle back when she finally calls. Hope she doesn’t have a ton of work to do there as it’s getting pretty late in the day. She’s new so I’m going to cut her some slack, but even if I had been in a building when she called it can take five to ten minutes to track down a fax machine so if she didn’t have the time to wait it would’ve been better to just call me after she’d gone to lunch and come back. Grrrr.

...looking for stuff to blog about in my RSS feeds and I’m coming up with a whole bunch’a nothin’. You’d think with as many different blogs and websites that I keep track of there’d be something, but so far nothing has gripped me. I’m feeling a complete lack of grippedness.

It’s almost four o’clock and I’ll be packing up in about 15 minutes to head back over to the campus for final check in and then go home. We had a pretty busy morning reinstalling the 76 PCs we broke down yesterday for an overnight move. You’d think that 76 PCs would take awhile to do, but there’s enough of us that on average we did around 7 PCs each, some of us a little more and some a little less, and it took all of an hour to do. Then I took a shuttle over to another building to do a couple of LAN jacks without the aid of a Fluke and then I went out to my car to eat lunch.

I eat lunch in the car because I’m often sleepy when I’m finished eating so if I have nothing else going on I’ll take a short nap. With no further assignments being phoned in I came over to the library at around 1:30 to set up my laptop and get some blogging in. Except that I can’t find anything to blog about other than what I did today at work. Go figure.

There was some positive news on the job hunt side of things today. I got a phone call from a new contract house looking for Call Center (read: Help Desk) people. I’m not a big fan of doing tech support over the phone, but it’d kick my pay up by another $6.50 an hour and provide full benefits including paid time off and tuition assistance so I was all ears. The job itself would be based in Detroit proper so it’d be a much longer drive, but it’s still a step up. Word had it that the company in question would be making decisions on who to interview this afternoon so I should hear back within a few days on whether or not I’ve got to dig out my going-to-an-interview clothes. I guess that little bit of news makes the rest of this needlessly verbose entry worthwhile.

It took awhile to get started, but they had me running tickets today seeing as the refresh project still wasn’t ready to go. Ended up doing about 14 of them before they put me on call. This is the first chance I’ve have to go to the library and check my email and there’s only about an hour or so before I’ll have to head back over for the final check in and then go home.

The process hasn’t improved any since I last ran tickets, it’s still long on the stupid and repetition that I’ve talked about previously, but at least it gave me something to do and passed the time. When I was younger I used to dream of a job where I’d get paid to sit around and do nothing, but experiencing it in a literal fashion doesn’t come close to the fantasy from days gone by. What I need is a job that pays me to blog and play video games all day long while sitting at my PC at home in my pajamas.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

...because I’m on call and thusly sitting across the street at the library. There was supposed to be a rather large project today, but either the PCs didn’t get delivered or someone canceled it or something ‘cause they had a whopping 10 PCs to refresh in one building today and that’s about it. There’s a chance I could get called to run some tickets, but I’m not holding my breath.

The laptop is currently staged with Windows XP and it’s running OK albeit a tad on the slow side. Might just slap Windows 98 on it later this week and be done with it. I did get Ubuntu installed at one point and even got it working with the 3COM 10/100 card, but couldn’t get it to work with my wireless card. Tried Puppy Linux out and that is nice and speedy, but couldn’t figure out how to get it to install on the hard drive and also couldn’t get it to work with my wireless card. So I slapped XP on for the time being.

The Warren public library is nice and big with lots of power outlets and wide open wireless so I should be fairly comfortable here for awhile. Just wish there were power outlets near by the larger tables. Need to take some screen cleaner to this laptop screen too. It’s a tad bit dusty. Didn’t notice it in the dark of the basement, but it sure stands out in daylight.

OK, time to get caught up on my blog reading. More later as I think of stuff to write about.