Three More Days To Go...

[bjarvis]

My last day at my Dear Employer is Friday. If I can survive today, tomorrow (in Reston, VA) and Friday (a half-day. What are they going to do --fire me?), all will be well.

I've been more busy in the past 48 hours at the office than I have been in weeks. While I'd like to think our apps teams are piling it on because they've realized I'm going away very, very soon, the reality is that they've only just raised their heads to realize that December 31 is only two weeks way and they're in a mad panic to meet year-end goals. Whatever.

We've replaced a lot of servers, decommissioned a bunch (one more tomorrow night), installed a few and tackled a number of real-time problem tickets. During this mess, I've also been taken out on team lunches twice and various folks and complete strangers keep dropping by my cube to say how much they'll miss me, chatting me up while I'm trying to catch up on the backlog. It sucks to be popular, but I think I'm holding up well under the load.

I start my new job on January 5, but they called in a mild panic last night asking if I could perchance skip over to the data center in Sterling, VA, to take a look at a crashed server. On the good side, I was indeed available. On the bad side, it was at the peak of rush hour with heavy rain and dropping temperatures. Yay.

I spent three hours working with an IBM/Red Hat Linux system. My current employer has a few of these but I was never allowed to touch them thanks to our stifling job restrictions. While the IBM Linux box was hardly cutting edge, it was a delightful opportunity to take apart a new machine, examine it carefully, learn its quirks & self-tests and essentially kick the tires without having to worry about setting off alarms, getting written up by auditing teams and going through disciplinary procedures.

The problem with the hardware's PCI bus isn't something I could fix without replacement parts so I left it powered off and had the California folks arrange an IBM service call. It was a long night, but the chance to play with something outside my normally constricted scope was soooo worth it.

Comments

[manley1.livejournal.com]

Will they pay you for your advance work?

I'm also surprised that you were authorized to work on their servers given that you haven't yet started.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

We had a gentlemen's agreement to bank these hours to be recorded in January when I officially start. They had to make special arrangements for me to enter the data center and I didn't have root access to the server so I couldn't get at the data without some (admittedly minor) effort.

Since they otherwise have no one on the east coast, they had the choice of (a) flying someone east to tackle this, (b) quickly arranging a contractor to do the work or (c) use me, already interviewed & vetted by the Powers-That-Be. Yup, still not exactly kosher but not a bad compromise.

Personally, I was happy to have an opportunity to become more familiar with the space, the hardware and some of the people off the clock so I'll be more useful when I actually start.

[wescobear.livejournal.com]

The hard part will be to try to keep a slightly sad look on your face as if you're truly going to miss your colleages and managers... BWAHAAAA! As if...