Long reply warning:

It was one of the best jobs, if not the best job I ever had. I was stoked to go to work each day. I lived in Boulder and Boulder wasn't as populated yet, so the commute was short. The commute involved driving up the mountainside, and it was normal to see elk, deer, bear, mountain lions, you name it, all on the daily commute. It was a great way to be greeted at the start of the day, and a reminder as to why climate sciences are so critical. The building is beautiful and the views are astounding. All of this is what made it very easy to get up for work daily.

At work, I was a contractor in the Scientific Computing Division (SCD), later renamed to Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) as a supercomputer operator.

I worked on several different supercomputer clusters from 2001-2006ish at NCAR Mesa Lab. The work hours flew by as I loved what I did, and most engineers and scientists seemed to love what they did, also. We all grumbled about pay, but such is the life of public scientists then and now.

During daily downtime, we would all just nerd out with people from other depts. The most basic real life example: "So what do those lights mean over there on that terminal/console?" and the person you are talking to, or who was talking to you, would do an information dump in the convo and you'd learn alllll kinds of new things, or teach others new things. We were mostly just all people who loved science and we got excited when others asked what we did.

I would regularly talk to the folks in the sun + space weather dept and could have done so for the rest of my life and been happy learning what they knew. I wanted to know what they did and how they did it, and they wanted to know the same for our dept. It was like this with any dept in so far as project and departmental NDAs and security clearances allowed.

My specific duty within the dept was to receive raw climatological and atmospheric data from field scientists and research facilities and educational institutions (and even tv meteorologists at times), format it into a computer language, and just feed the data into the clusters for computation. The data may be current or old, it just depended upon the project we were running for whomever. Climate models got spat out. It wasn't as tedious or boring as it sounds, due to the above coworkers, plus knowing all of that computational power could bow down to you with the right keystrokes (Crysis jokes were still hip and prevalent back then). You wanted the data to be fed in accurately, as any errors in computation were wasted energy (electricity) and time, both of which are precious when running clusters. So, we made sure no GIGO.

A particular work day that stands out was February 1, 2003. My shift was to start at 7 am local time, but I had arrived to work 15 mins early. At exactly 7 am, NCAR SCD got a call from NASA about Space Shuttle Columbia. We were to immediately put all clusters towards the goal of crunching all atmospheric and environmental data to aid in determining if the astronauts and shuttle could have survived, and where the craft would even have made terrestrial contact. It was a very solemn day, but we all knew what we were doing every moment of that day was critical.