Places you wished you had worked

[Jon Marshall]

Reading the telco stories got me thinking about some of the places i have been to while contracting.

I have worked mainly for large companies who have a lot of procedures and change controls in place so getting anything done is a major effort. In my last job one of my tasks was to connect up about 100 3rd party companies via VPN to our network. Some of these companies had inhouse expertise and some didn't so i spent a lot of time on the phone talking them through what they need to do.

A few of the companies didn't have a firewall so we supplied them with pix firewalls. Most managed to get them working, but one company just couldn't get it to work. I spent hours on the phone to them but still no joy so in the end i had to go to their site.  When i got there, they were some of the friendliest bunch of guys i have met. Straight away they told me they were clueless about networking so they would happily do anything i say.

They were in a converted 4 floor house so the computer room was on the 4th floor at the top of the stairs. The idea was to have their cable modem plugged into the pix on the outside and then the LAN on the inside of the pix. I thought this is what they had done but what they actually did was simply run ethernet cables from both pix interfaces to their LAN patch panel. This explained why with all the testing i had done over the phone i had never seen a single packet from them.

So they asked me if i knew what was wrong and i told them how it needed to be connected up. I remember i was kneeling down looking at the pix and the cable modem and i said we needed to disconnect the cable modem and reconnect it up to the pix. I was about to say "of course you will need to do this out of hours because it will take down the internet" when a cable appears over my left shoulder. At the same time, the other guy with me pops his head out of the door and shouts "internet will be down for a while" down the stairs.

Needless to say i connected things up pretty sharpish...

I really enjoy working for big companies because you get to use all the latest technologies but every now and then when i am submitting my 20th change control just to add a vlan on a switch i sometimes think it might be fun to work at a company like the one above !

Jon

[burleyman]

The place I wish I had worked more is the beach. Think about it, you get days off when it rains, you get to work over time when it is sunny and not mind. The view of everything is great. The biggest rule is to wear sunglasses when watching the sights, that is mainly so you don't get backhanded by the wife or girlfriend or in some cases both ;-)

That is what I am looking for in my next job, and I know they are out there because last year during vacation in Garden City Beach in South Carolina I talked to this guy who had a computer on the beach. I asked him are you crazy why are you playing on the computer on the beach? He said he was working so I said man that $uck$. He told me "no" he works from here (the beach) everyday, his job allowed him to work from "home" and he pointed to his little beach house right there on the beach. He hooked up a nice outdoor wireless so he would have coverage on the beach and there he goes off to work. Now I also have to say there is one draw back, once every 1 or 2 months he has to fly up to Boston for a couple days, that is where the office is located, they do not have an office where he is....I know his life is hard. After thinking his life does not $uck...mine does.....the beach everyday for work that pays great....wait! he does $uck! but that is what I am looking for so I tried to ask my boss if I could give that a try because most of the work I do is remotely anyways......well here I am at work and nowhere near the beach so everyone knows that did not work to my favor but I still try and look :-)

Mike

[Rob Huffman]

Hey Mike (Cross-over cable) Burleyman

Hope all is well buddy!

Loved this post! (+5) Being that we have no really warm beaches in Canada (well at

least not for 8 months of the year ) I'll just take working from home so Carmie

and I don't have to do the Winter 500 drive so often

Cheers!

Huff

PS: I'll just sit in the Teepee with my laptop (no phone!!)

[burleyman]

I know what you mean Rob "Teepee dude" Huffman...ROFL....oh I slay myself sometimes! Where I live we get about 100+ inches of snow per year.....I am too old for this ***T! I figure the only way I will get the beach office is to win the lottery.

Mike

[varrao]

Wow, never thought that postis outside Security woudl be so fun. Now when everyone's got a piece to share,I do have one for myself too, and this was the Primary reason why i ran away from my previous job. The CM in my company consisted of people with no knowledge about network but absolute exhaustive knowledge about how to delay things with rubbish policies. We were hitting a bug on an ASA code I knew we had to upgrade, for which obviously change management would poke in. I had the image on the flash all commands already set, just need to enter "reload", and those bunch of nerds took 45 days to just play ping pong on e-mails and planning out the next  expedition of man on neptune (well, seriously it seemed like).And when finally the day arrived when I was all set to land on neptune...lol . Just went into  the server room and did reload and neptune conquered. All those guy were like, how did you do it so quickly, you are very efficient blah blah blah..... well if they could work like an engineer, they would know the difference between an ASA upgrade and landing on neptune

Thanks guys for starting such a fun thread, really needed to come out my shell.

Cheersss

Varun

[burleyman]

Varun great post 5+....I wish I could say I understand but we don't have that here..... There are only 3 people (me being one of them) that do router and switch changes and the same three that handle the change managment.... I am lucky! but still want the beach job!

Mike

[Rob Huffman]

Hey Mike,

I just won $5 in the lottery.....will that get us where we need

to go ...hahahahahaha! (+5 C-O-C-G)

Varun.....thanks for the new CM analogy (+5) I will now refer to our

CM scheme as "planning out the next  expedition of man on neptune"

now that the shuttle is retired.

Cheers!

Huff

[Kimberly Adams]

Hey Guys,

Back in the beginning of my career, I had an interview at Cedars-Sinai in West LA and they wanted me to move into LA and I couldn't do that or afford to do it.  But they didn't want me to be 75 miles away in case of emergency and such.  That would have been really cool and nice to put on my resume but it didn't happen.

$5 in the lottery.....maybe just a few more for that "Beach" job! 

Cheers!

Kimberly

[Leo Laohoo]

Back in December 2011, I noticed that a X6716-10GE card is failing due to a faulty power module.

So I passed this information to the team that "owns" the 6509E and recommended that they rush there pronto and replace it.  One of the senior guys agreed how severe this was and he took "ownership".

Half an hour later, he's still sitting behind his desk so I went over to him and asked him, point blank, whether or not he's replaced the blade.

"Can't," he replied.

"Why?" I asked.

"No change control."

"So why can't you ask your other team members to raise one in your behalf while you do the dirty work?"

"Because no one will do it.  If I am going to fix it, I have to be the one to raise the Change Request."

By this time, half of me wanted to laugh and half of me wanted to walk out and look for a fire axe.  It then occured to me that someone has REMOVED all the fire axe from the building.  You'll see the fire hose and the "handle" where the fire axe use to be but no fire axe.  Heck, they even removed the glass pane

Forty-five minutes later he's still here.

"Change request hasn't been approved?" I asked.

"It's been approved.  I'm now looking for a replacement."

"What do you mean 'looking for a replacement'?  We've got tons of these cards sitting in the storage room!"

"No one has access to the storage room," came the reply.

In disgust, I stormed out and went into the Data Centre and in 30 seconds came out with a X6716-10GE.

"I can't use that," the senior guy said.

"And why not?"

"Because it's to be used in a deployment soon."

"Listen bud.  This line card along with the rest of the same line cards and 6509V have been sitting in the DC without any power for the last 14 months.  There's snowball-chance-in-he11 they're going to miss this particularly when RMA will most likely arrive in the next two days.  So USE IT!"   He did.

This is one place I DON'T WANT TO BE IN.

[Ben Lavender]

Good story John, I'm still training and home for the CCNA and hope to do some contract work in the future, I think it's probably the best for experience.

And I agree about change management, I work on a service desk at present and know from there that such things are one hell of a task for some of the simplest ammendments.

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