This is kind of a weird time of year for me.  There’s a lot of mixed emotions for me during this time of year as birthdays are just weird for me.  Every year, I contemplate going home for labor day weekend to kind of spend my birthday with my parents, or just wishing they were here (but usually don’t since it’s just not worth driving for just the weekend).  Birthdays have usually just been a celebration with my family.  When I think back on previous birthdays, I can really only point to one and say "yeah, it was fantastic!".  It’s not that I’ve had shitty birthdays, they just weren’t all that memorable.Also every year, I get a little freaked out about how I’m nowhere near where I had planned nor wanted to be professionally, nor in my personal life.

I keep being asked what I want to do for my birthday, and I have absolutely no freaking idea what I want to do.  I don’t like planning or figuring that type of thing out at all.

This time of year also becomes a bit harder for me as we near 9/11.  Yep, I will fully admit that I probably am a bit PTSD from that, but not in a way that prohibits me from doing anything, or impacts how I live my life.  It’s just something that lingers in my mind, and always will.  It actually took one year almost exactly after 9/11/01 before I didn’t cry just at the mere thought of it.  I think a day rarely goes by that I don’t actually have a passing thought of it.  I know this is a weird post, but it’s kind of just what is on my mind.

Even after 2 days/nights of being with friends and enjoy life, I still feel the frustration of this past week taking its toll still.  Its week like these that remind that there is still a huge disconnect between myself and my boss.  His reality checks keep bouncing as far as what my work load is like, or how competent the rest of the team (save one person, J) isn’t.   I’m so bored and unchallenged in my job currently, that I’m desperately seeking change.  I’m the type of worker that is constantly looking for a challenging project to take on, even if I have to "invent" one.  I keep telling him this….I’m not sure how many times I’ve flat out told him that I’m bored out of my mind in my job. In that time, he’s managed to find _one_ challenging project for me to takeover.  I’ve found a couple of others in that time on my own, and thankfully, they’ve been deemed "high priority".  However, because of the aforementioned incompetency of teammates, I’ve spent 1.5 days worth of time on this latest project.  I’ve had to twice tell the PM to push the deadline for completion back 3 days.  Having to do this, makes me incredibly pissy.  Finally, on Friday, I’d just about how my fill of the incompetency when the "engineer" on duty spent 2.5 days looking into a problem.  The problem was of course then handed off to me.   This was one of the few times that the engineer actually knew more about it than I did….and I tried explaining that, but still got handed it.  At this point, I was fairly pissed off and fed up, so I took the "issue" and without any prior info from the "engineer" fixed it in a matter of an hour.  WTF DID HE DO FOR 2.5 DAYS!  And *I* GUESSED at the solution.  This pissed me off even _more_ than the fact that I’d had yet another issue being dropped on me because people lack troubleshooting/problem solving skills.

Some of this I think is me…I really do assume that anyone in a technical field has a certain level of logical thinking and problem solving.  What is incredibly simple and evident to me, is just clearly not to others.  It was told to me recently that I seriously underestimate my skills and abilities, especially in my resume.  The term "SME" (Subject Matter Expert) has come up multiple times, and often as a description of my skillset in my current position.  I hate this term, and I hate even more when someone says that I am one.  I am not an expert.  An expert, to me, implies that I have nothing more (or very little) to learn about a specific subject.  In the areas which I’m considered a SME, I still have massive amounts to learn.  The only thing I’ll admit to, is that I have a good understanding of the basic end to end functionality of our platform.  I don’t think that makes me a SME though.

So, about 9pm Wednesday night, we took a power hit in our lab server room at work.  This room has about 200 servers, and for some idiotic reason I’ve yet to figure out, isn’t on generator power.  Each rack has a UPS though, so in theory, it should outlast a power blip.  Unfortunately, the HVAC requires a manual restart.  So, what’s that mean?

Closed room + 200 servers + no ventilation/cooling + 12 hrs (how long before it was brought to our attention) = 109 degrees in the COOLEST part of the room.

The door to the server room was actually warm to the touch, and pulling out the keyboard drawer made me go "ooh, that’s _hot_".  This is something I’ve been through before, and had a heads up about it on the way to the office.  It’s very similar to a mass casualty incident, you triage and move as quickly as possible through.  And well, you do usually have some casualties as computers don’t like to work in that heat.  Today’s count: 5 dead power supplies (that we know of, we likely will have some hardware issues stemming from this in the near future).

This is probably the 10th time I’ve gone through this since being there..so it’s kind of become "routine".  A year ago though, when it was just J and I dealing with it, we would have a good majority back online by noon.   We wouldn’t have to communicate much, we very quickly divided up and conquered. Today? Well, things have changed and we have more resources. But more resources does not equal quality.  I basically spent the entire day being server/hardware monkey and dealing with these "remote" resources who were trying earnestly to help…but who lack the troubleshooting expertise or even clue on how to get through this.  Just trying to get them to focus instead of looking and thinking of everything that had to be brought up was a task in futility.  They are good people, but it’s just not a good time to try to teach someone troubleshooting skills…at all.

There’s a very specific order that is necessary to bring everything back up and have it working…if you ignore this order, you’ll be fighting issues for a while.  It’s an extremely complex/integrated system.   Focus became the word of the day for these more junior "engineers", but it’s frustrating being the one telling them to focus.   It’s also frustrating when they compliment you on the documentation you’ve written to cover this (like I said, we’ve been through this a few times), and yet, I still had to hold their hands and guide them through the document step by step.

 5 PM came, and we still had very little back up, as something was just off with each environment, but not in the same way to point to one specific thing.  I was asked to stay and handle it…and was offered more resources from our India team..  I finally just started working on it declining the extra resources, and had the environments back up approximately 10pm.

I did have to make one sanity call to an extremely knowledgeable engineer as after looking at stuff for 6 hrs, and not getting different results was driving me up a wall.  As we were discussing the issue and checking configuration files, I managed to stumble across a stale mount that ultimately had been the source of the issue (the config for an obscure and never used component could not be loaded).  Man, I felt like an idiot.  Although, it was nice to have this engineer talk to me as a peer and actually sound impressed that I figured out that that was the issue after all.

Yeah, I know, long post…but I think I just needed to vent and get this out.  The only good thing is…there is no way in hell I’m working tomorrow.

So…I think once I’m done with my ALS internship, I’m going to try to get my paramedic.  Thankfully, there’s a very good chance I can get the county to actually pay for this.

It’s interesting, one of my goals in life is to also get a bachelors degree…and I’m more willing to put my time towards the pursuit of this than get my butt in gear for a degree.  Although, any degree I _want_ would not qualify to be paid for by my company. I’m fairly certain they wouldn’t pay for a degree in emergency/disaster management.  Also, this degree is not exactly easy to find at all. There are a few programs that carry it, but I am leery about the accreditation of the program.  I want to be the one putting together emergency/incident action plans, or taking command of a major incident.  I find all of that to be extremely challenging.

Let me caveat the above…I don’t take pleasure in the misfortune in others in the way it sounds often.  But it’s more that my philosophy is that "shit happens" and I just wanna be there when it happens.

I hate being in IT. I get bored incredibly easily in IT and I get frustrated as well.  I don’t do well at being bored.  I have occasional moments that are challenging, but I find that in order to stay challenged in IT, I usually have to change jobs every 2 years.  (gee…I’m overdue….and I’m bored….I hope the internal position comes through, it’d be challenging for about 2 years!).  I almost curse that I’m good at my job…it kind of becomes the "easy" thing to do.

Stealing a "meme" from K and M that I thought was unique and fairly interesting…

 Four things you may or may not know about me:

1. I contemplate a career change every day of my life.
2. I really want to learn how to play guitar
3. I used to smoke.
4. Integrity is probably one of the things I value and respect the most in others.

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1. Audio Engineer
2. Senior Network Engineer (in function but not in title)
3. Concert/band promoter
4.  Systems Engineer (helped build the 311 system for NYC)

Four movies I’ve watched more than once:

1. Top Gun
2. The Right Stuff
3. Bad Boys II
4. Heat

Four places I have been:

1. Ohio
2. New York
3. Virginia
4. (Most of the continental US, but only outside of it to go to Canada)

Four of my favorite foods:

1. Chicken
2. Smoked Gouda
3. Macaroni and Cheese
4. Coffee

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. At the firehouse
2. At the beach
3. In Italy
4. At Doukenie Winery

Four things I am looking forward to in the next year:

1. Completing my ALS Internship
2. Beginning paramedic school
3. Getting a raise
4. Seeing my parents