I got this job at the State Fire Marshall’s Office to help this guy to get fire departments across the state of Illinois access to fast internet and video conference equipment. This would speed up communication and help share information in the event of an emergency so that the crisis can be dealt with quickly. This sounds all well and good to me. Saving the world, making a difference, using this college degree that so far has seemed to be worth spit, all of this was great.
I find out that when I walk into the office on Tuesday that the guy I was hired to help retired on FRIDAY! So RoB is out in the cold and is totally confused as to what to do. So, I did what anyone would do in this situation. I began bullshitting heavily.
I first said that I had to make some maps of the sites across the state that had the fast internet on our network and another map showing video conference sites. This took up the better part of two days while I sat around doing art projects. Finally, it turned out that some people HAD heard that I was coming and they found some work for me to do. I have since attended a conference on emergency preparedness, organized maps for every county in Illinois, written up procedures for the use of all the high-tech toys in the command center, and helped install the new video conference equipment. This last one was quite exciting.
I got in to work on Wednesday morning and wandered into the “bat cave” as I have started calling it. No sooner had I sat down then two guys come in and asked me where they could find Mike (my boss). I said he wasn’t in yet and asked if I could help. They told me that they had come earlier in the week and dropped off their equipment, but now they needed to install it. I showed them where it had been stored and where it needed to go and sat down to watch.
As the day wore on, I began helping more and more with the installation and eventually got to where I was explaining stuff to one of the installer guys. Someone from the Ameritech office came by the cave. He was obviously someone important since the two installer guys were deferring to him whenever there was a question. After the system was in, the important guy looked at me and asked “So, how long have you been working for Ameritech? I don’t remember seeing you around the office.” I told him I worked for the Fire Marshall. He seemed a bit surprised but at that moment my boss came in.
I showed him what we had installed and how to work it and what it was capable of and what we still needed. The important guy had pulled out a pen and a pad and asked me when it was good for me to have the remaining stuff installed. I looked at him and said “I’m just the tech boy here. I’m not the one to ask when to install things.” The important guy looked at Mike and said “We’ll just coordinate everything with RoB if that’s ok. He seems to know more about this then anyone else here.”
This was a massive ego boost for me. In fact, I floated until Friday morning when I had to do a demonstration of the system for the whole office including Mr. Russell the Fire Marshall. As these things always go, the system worked fine when I tried it on Thursday. But of course it didn’t work the one time the boss was standing there. Fortunately he was really cool about it.
I later found out that it was actually a problem with the system, not me. Even so, this really upset me. I went out and drove around for a while listening to TOOL and eventually found what I needed to make me feel better. Mike actually found it on my expense sheet.
“RoB?”
“Yeah Mike?”
“I can understand where you marked ‘maps’ and ‘marking stickers’ on your sheet, I can even understand where you put ‘folders’ because you used them on the county map project, but what is this?”
I looked where it said stack of Wolverine comics - $6.00. I said “I think it’s pretty self explanatory.”
As you can probably guess, he didn’t end up signing off on the comic books.