Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mothra]

Okay, so my company just got stone cold bought out by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and they're going to be moving us all to corporate HQ in downtown Boston by year's end. On the plus, this means 401k perhaps, on the downside, I will go from a tight, delightful troupe of 12 people to the tiniest cog in the tiniest corner of a 4,000-employee conglomerate. Forecast currently has me training their employees how to do my job.

Employee reviews are not promising, either.

GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS

[Joxam]

I got kind of bored with not having a job, so I got one. Doesn't start until later on this spring, but come late April I'm a projectionist again. Yay!

[JDigital]

That's good. I heard you were a good projectionist.

[Joxam]

I heard that too. I was expecting to have to work back up to it, but the manager was like, "Well what I could really use is a projectionist" so I was like :D

[Shinra]

Pretty good odds I've got a 2-week contract.  That's it -- no chance of a permanent position and the pay's not great, but it's better than nothing.  And most importantly, it means I'm eligible for my health plan for a couple more months; I was just about to have to switch to COBRA.

Have an interview for something more long-term on Thursday but this might make me have to reschedule; will see how flexible the bosses are.

Hah, cobra. You might as well set your money on fire.

Good luck.

[Shinra]

So my job at the Verizon IT service desk continues, and I am learning a lot more about what exactly Verizon does to earn it's income. Verizon's obviously best known for it's retardedly huge CDMA network, but they're also one of the world's largest internet providers. Coming with that territory is apparently multiple-million dollar contracts with a number of extremely large companies that pay entirely too much to employ workers like me. Verizon acts as the helpdesk for a few large companies, like Fedex and Dunkin Donuts. Agents who have been on with the helpdesk past the intro hire period usually get picked up and trained for commercial accounts so they can help Verizon actually, you know, earn a wage. It's a step up from resetting the passwords of central office technicians who only log into their email to get employee discounts.

I've recently been trained to support Vangent. Vangent is an information management company that handles almost entirely government contracts - the largest of which is social security and medicare. You would think that a company that handles government accounts would have some serious internal security policies. Nope! Hilariously, anyone in the company can reset the password of anyone else in the company with a simple phone call. No password, no secret question. All they have to do is provide an employee id - and we have no way of verifying that the employee ID even belongs to them! Granted, you have to go through a secure VPN to access their network, but we even have Vangent users who access the VPN without being on vangent assets, and considering how freely the company gives away laptops to their employees, an enterprising terrorist, thief, or spy could access to an incredible amount of information with a little know-how.

In short: hurray for knowing too fucking much, and having entirely too much power at my fingertips. Hell, the things I could do to the Verizon network with my access alone is bad enough. Now I have access to government accounts?

[Classic]

The ministry of fiscal responsibility is going to take you in Shinra.

[Thad]

Hah, cobra. You might as well set your money on fire.

Yeah, I know.  The insurance I'm on now is a pretty big ripoff too, but as I've said before, most temps don't get insurance at all.  And any kickback on all the meds I take for my asthma is a relief.

Anyway, yeah, job's a go; I sit in a hot room performing repetitive tasks all day for not very much pay, but the people I work with are good and I'm working for an organization I'm proud to be a part of.  Plus it sounds like they've got more rollouts coming, so even though it's not steady work it might end up being a sporadic thing, which is better than a one-time thing.

Heard out of another agency today that seems pretty keen to place me in a sysadmin job.  Good pay; don't know who it's for yet.  I know that it's graveyard and it's 20 miles or so from where I live -- but the graveyard thing's not necessarily bad (you mean when it's 110 out this summer I'll be SLEEPING?), and if I'm driving that far I'd rather it not be rush hour anyway.  And given the way our schedules are currently working, I wouldn't really see my girlfriend any less than I already do.

Not sure what to do about having a beer after work, though.  Bars are closed and kicking back with a beer on the couch at 9 AM just seems weird.

[Niku]

actually, going back to the discussions about saturday morning cartoons ..

[R^2]

I've been looking for a job in Atlanta for six months, with virtually no leads for three.

I'm about to move to Nashville. I have three job leads there already.

[Brentai]

tl;dr your entire problem was living in Georgia?

I've got family in Nashville, but I don't think they can help you very much.  Still, I'll remember it if it ever turns out they can.

[R^2]

To be fair, I did briefly move back to Nashville in 2008, and couldn't find work there then either.

[Mothra]

What're you trying to find work doing?

[Classic]

Being a super-chef?

[Mongrel]

Being a SOUPER CHEF

Oh Classic, that was terrible.

[Classic]

I was more imagining him fighting crime with a 6-burner stove, but that's also the kind of horrible thing I would think of and post.

[Thad]

The job has hit the point where I'm copying large files, which of course means I'm mostly sitting there waiting for the filecopy to finish.  Easy stuff, obviously, but it's frustrating, partly because I prefer to be doing something, and partly because a fucking network hiccup can kill 20GB file transfers on a dozen different computers simultaneously and make me have to start the entire fucking process over.  (This happened to a machine that had "35 seconds remaining" on its dialog today.  I am not kidding.)

So out of curiosity, has Windows 6.x fixed MS's fucking unbelievably bad, inadequate, 1980's-era filecopy?  Like, is Explorer now prepared for the fact that people sometimes make 90-minute network downloads?  Because XP sure as hell isn't.  (Of course, at least it's just ONE big file on each machine in this case.  It's much worse when you're copying a huge directory structure, have trouble copying one file, and Explorer terminates the entire copy halfway through with no easy mechanism for picking up where you left off without overwriting the files that DID copy.)

(I am aware there are third-party tools that will handle interruptions/resumes, and there even seem to be a couple MS ones, though I'm not sure if they support network directory paths.  But I'm not sure it's worth the effort to get approval to install additional software on these computers, given that this is only a two-week contract and this is a medical organization and therefore there's even more red tape involved in getting software approved than in a typical job.)

[Shinra]

You'll be extremely pleased to know that, fuck no windows hasn't fixed the problem of network file transfers.

[Thad]

Yaaaaay.

Anyway.  They want me to come back next week.  Not sure if it's the whole week or just a couple days; hope I don't get stuck in the donut hole where I make the same amount as I would from unemployment, but of course there are benefits to working besides just the paycheck.

[MadMAxJr]

Been out of work since January.  Shifting gears, just got CompTIA A+ certified, shooting for Network+ in two weeks.  Goodbye programming, I'll work helldesk before I come back to you.  Time to fix some god damned computers...  If I can find a lead.  My agent says there are 15 openings, will see who wants to talk.