"The New Job"

It's been another month since I posted in this thing. And I wouldn't be now but there's no AC outlets provided in starbucks and those games suck a lot of juice.

In any case it's march and it's friday. So as you may have guessed Winter just started. Yes, I will probably get snow at my house tonight. In my area of the world, ya see, it snows maybe once every 15 years or so. So when it happens it's like news making. For the local "this just in: water makes things wet" TV stations who like stupid stories anyway. I suppose most places winter is about over come mid-march. But here it's just starting.

Oh and I got a new job. This one is a contract going to at least the end of July. That's what I'm hoping for also. I'm too paranoid to say which company or companies I'm working for. Ok I'm not too paranoid. I'm working for AT&T or "SBC, the new AT&T" as they like to say during the merger. ATT has out-sourced all there "desk-side support" to IBM, who has sub-contracted to another contractor. That's the one paying me. At least I hope they'll be paying me. I'll find out when I get home today.

I have only been working at this place for about a week and a half (started the 1st, today's the 10th) and I already have 8 hours over time. So that's nice then. It's pretty much identical to my last job with a few minor differences in the way they do things. Like carrying around an external USB HDD with all the PC images for instance. That's different from the prior job.

Did I ever write about the job in Reno I wonder? I don't feel like looking it up. Probably didn't. It was a fun little trip. Spent too much money on slots of course. But that's to be expected. Why in the world they couldn't find any body locally to do that job I haven't the slightest idea. Wasn't really that hard. And I made them a pay **A LOT** of money for it. I probably didn't break even despite this. Stupid slots.

I did play the Star Wars slot. A penny machine with a max 30 lines at 10 pennies each. That's $3 a spin! But you can also do 30 cents a spin, which is what I did. I have to say I really found it more fun than the "Star Wars Arcade" video game in the arcade. The last day for instance I put in $7 for the slot and had a grand time getting to "bonus" levels and spinning the death star and watching Vader/obi wan fight. I was having so much fun.

Of course most of my off-time was spent down in the arcade playing a pinball game based on the lord of the rings. I must have spent $100 on that game. The last couple days I was there that game was "out of order". I was so disapointed.

Other than that Reno is REALLY cold. It snowed the first night with no signs of a coming storm on the ride up there. And of course it was really icy. Works didn't have so much tread so that was a little hard.

The first day I tore down some server cabinets and loaded them into a rental truck. The following four days I went through about 30 old PCs wiping hard drives and installing XP on 700+ Mhz systems. That's what I did for four days. The last day I couneter several more entire piles of systems, mostly guessing on exact numbers. Sounds fun huh? And worth paying someone who lives about 200 miles away to drive up and do? Hah.

But back to this job. ATT. The security is really, really high. Keycards at entrances and a lot of doors inside. Security cameras. At least this place has elevators in all the multi-story buildings. The primary one even has escelators to all four floors. I'm sorry, I'm just accustomed to only seeing that in department stores.

So far there really hasn't been much for me to do. I've shadowed a few of my co-workers to learn the process and they're particular set of ways to do things.  ¶ 10:54 AM