Twiddling My Thumbs

Posted by bartonkj@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 33 comments

When I was oh so much younger, I worked as a Systems Administrator for an obsolescent network operating system in a Fortune 500 company. They were in the process of deploying Windows NT instead of the Banyan Vines system I took care of. I was employed to manage the old system until they shut it down. Because the Banyan Vines servers had long ago been stabilized, and because their usage was decreasing, I basically sat around twiddling my thumbs all day. I was a young go getter, so I had a real psychological problem with this. I kept thinking I needed to be productive and busy, but there just wasn't anything to do. I browsed the web all day and read books, but I always felt stressed about it like I was going to get in trouble. I finally had a conversation with my boss one day and expressed concerns about this. He said, don't worry about it, we're not paying you to keep busy when things are going well, we're paying you to fix problems when/if they come up. After that I felt a little better about getting paid to browse the web and read books, but I still didn't feel 100% comfortable with it. Man, now I would totally eat that shit up. I wish I could have fully enjoyed what I had when I had it. Oh well, so it goes....

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Ricama@reddit

One of the many jobs that the better you do it, the less you have to do.

VanorDM@reddit

The two stages of IT.

"Everything is going fine. - Why are we paying you guys to do nothing?"

"Everything is on fire. - Nothing works why are we paying you guys?"

straybrit@reddit

Similar to the story of QA
"We're not seeing any customer issues - why are we bothering to do QA"
"Customer red zones issues - why are we paying QA"

NotYourReddit18@reddit

Simple solution: Outsource the QA to the customer by selling early access to the closed beta as part of the more expensive software packages.

Microsoft product manager spotted off the starboard bow 😀

Nah, Microsoft just pushes their beta software to their customers, labeled as the "new" version of existing apps, and forces users to migrate before all features of the old software have been ported to the new one.

THEY WILL NEED TO PRY CLASSIC OUTLOOK FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS❗

I was more thinking about various gaming publishers.

If possible Thunderbird may be your friend. I have to use Outlook for a niche use case and it's amazing how bad it seems.

I'm already using Thunderbird privately, but company policy dictates that we have to use MS Office apps. At least everyone of my coworkers agrees that New Outlook is shit.

bruce_desertrat@reddit

That's not entirely surprising, since Outlook has always been shit. It's just that people have been Stockholm Syndromed into liking it by generations of business managers and IT bullies

Stryker_One@reddit

I've been loving Mailspring for home use.

In new outlook they changed the context menu for spelling to left click...

WTF? Who could even remotely think this was a good idea?

Miles_Saintborough@reddit

Pretty much video games nowadays.

SoItBegins_n@reddit

Kickstarter!

discobunnywalker75@reddit

As a QA this made me chuckle 🤣

morningstar216@reddit

As a QA this triggered legit flashbacks 😭😖

g3rmb0y@reddit

I was the last remaining employee from an acquisition, and I had to more or less sundown an old product. While it was sad to see the support queue dwindle, I was getting paid great money to answer maybe 5-10 easy support emails a day. In retrospect, I probably should have been taking a lot more vacations and enjoying myself more, but I had this puritanical work ethic so I'd stay at home, by my computer, 8 hours a day, more or less surfing the net and being the one person that knew how to answer esoteric questions. I miss that.

Shortly after, they switched me over to a SRE team, where I was on call 80 hours a week (while working 2 other jobs that I had picked up because I was bored.) That was hellish.

Ha-Funny-Boy@reddit

I worked for a company in Los Angeles that was bought by a company in Chicago. Everyone was offered a job in Chicago. I told them the company did not have enough money to pay me to move to Chicago. Everyone but one guy turned down the offer and he was the first one to quit before the shutdown date!

dreniarb@reddit

puritanical work ethic - i like this better than pride and ego. :)

Penners99@reddit

I still support a NT4 system on a “as needed” basis.

ThunderDwn@reddit

Banyan. Vines.

God, I haven't thought of that particular abomination in decades! brings back memories of token ring and ArcNet networks!

Geminii27@reddit

You were being paid to be a firefighter. Not for the days you sit around the fire station and maybe do maintenance on the trucks, but for that possible moment when all of a sudden the sirens go off and you are FRONT AND CENTER AND GO GO GO.

jeffrey_f@reddit

A firefighter isn't paid to put out fires all day, but if that happens, the firefighter will be ready to do so.

KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit

I've had this twice now, and both times it was related to incipient redundancy.

The first time was because they kept pushing back my leaving date (the project to replace the ERP systems that I supported was running into problems), so while I had very little BAU work and a couple of tiny project tasks, my time was my own. I think I finished watching Grimm on Netflix that summer, and worked on a large crochet blanket. Hell, I even looked into creating RPG programs on the (soon-to-be-decommissioned) AS/400.

The second time was because the PTB had announced that our department was surplus to requirements in September, but had no idea how to go about legally getting rid of a team that included a member on maternity leave. So there we were, pretending to go about our normal work, without having anything to deliver. Except for the day when my director (who was also getting the chop) asked me to document how to delete the system that we'd created. That kept me busy for, oh, minutes! The days that I "worked" from home in that period also gave me a lot of time for crochet.

ShalomRPh@reddit

Well, except for the one on maternity leave.

She had already delivered :P

jeepsaintchaos@reddit

The deliverable was ultimately judged to be rather immature. In fact it promptly sent out an error message and did a core dump.

spiritsarise@reddit

As we age in life we begin to understand too late how sometimes the saying, “Youth is wasted on the young,” can be so spot on!

HerfDog58@reddit

He said, don't worry about it, we're not paying you to keep busy when things are going well, we're paying you to fix problems when/if they come up.

Your boss had obviously heard the story about a company calling a retired engineer to come in and repair a critical piece of production equipment; retiree says "Sure, for $10,000" and the company agrees since they need the machine back up. Guy comes in, looks at the machine for a couple minutes, checks a couple settings, then pulls out a hammer, and gives the machine a solid whack in a particular spot. Machine starts humming along, returns to a normal production output.

Company Owner is infuriated - "WE PAID YOU TEN GRAND TO WHACK THE MACHINE WITH A HAMMER?!?!"

The engineer replied "No, you paid me 10 bucks to whack the machine with a hammer. You paid me $9,990 to know WHERE to whack the machine with a hammer."

I kind of feel like the young you now - my current job is certainly not taxing. I have plenty of unstructured time in between bursts of panic. I use it to do deeper dives on the systems I manage, learn new skills, and work on things like documentation. I may not be building servers all day every day, but I'm learning better ways to ride herd over what I'm administering in between formally assigned tasks.

SpongeJake@reddit

Well hello fellow Banyan Vines guy!! As soon as I read the first line I wondered if you were referencing that system. Man the days back then were so much fun weren’t they?

Especially when it came time to upgrade the servers with the 20+ floppy disks we had to use. And God help you if you mixed up the order.

I recall the rite of passage all new techs seemed to go through with that system. Like pressing the F2 key at the root of a directory, instead of the correct subdirectory, and copying all the ARLs down the tree.

One guy I knew did it at the root of the mail directory - and suddenly no one could log in. Hilarious.

bartonkj@reddit (OP)

I’ve done so much since then that I don’t remember a damn thing about any of the technical specifics. Sit me down in front of a banyan system today and I would be totally lost, LOL.

Once you get a large enough organization, at least back then, they often have positions marked for very specific dedicated tasks, and like I said, the system was really fine tuned enough to not need much, if any interaction, after all, people were slowly migrating off that system. The things that kept me busiest were installing new printers and answering the pager in the middle of the night when the backups monkey encountered a problem (OK, that’s a little mean, but to be fair, he wasn’t very knowledgeable and basically just followed a very straightforward set of procedures [on many different platforms] and when anything deviated from the norm he kind of panicked).

ManWhoIsDrunk@reddit

For anyone in a similar situation as this today, i recommend pushing for the workplace providing a few certifications in up-and-coming technology or other relevant areas that can be useful for the business.

If the business already appreciates that you can be idle when everything is running all right, they may very well appreciate improving your competence for when shit hits the fan.

dazcon5@reddit

I had a similar experience except the agency was transition from Netware 3.12 to a fully Windows back end.

When I first started the server had been pretty much ignored for years so it was a mess. It took me a few months to get it all updated and working smoothly. For about 6 months I had nothing to do except babysit the Netware server and get ready for the migration. I was bored to tears and already had my Microsoft NT cert. Once the boss asked me to automate something so I whipped up a quick batch file to take care of it which led to me creating all manner of scripts for the NT system.

MountainMark@reddit

They also serve who also sit and wait.

Yeah, sometimes things get slow and I feel overpaid but then sometimes the crap hits the fan and I'm up for 36 hours. I figure it all works out.