Old-School Dave-Blog #3 - Random 2AM Ramblings

Seeing as it's almost 2AM, I thought I'd let you all have a peak at my life when I was on shift at Bell. As you can see, I wasn't a big fan of it, so I felt that I had to do something about it. At the end of the post, it mentions that I'm "looking at possibilities," which at the time consisted of finding a new job. I guess the only possibility I could see for myself was that if I didn't like what I was doing, I had to do something else. Only later did I find that it is possible to change what I already have instead of just writing it off as a lost cause.

Sometime during that period, I was struggling with a lot of bad repair work that was coming my way. My job was to take broken data circuits, diagnose the fault and direct the repair on behalf of the customer, and a lot of the tickets I was getting from the help desk for a certain type of circuit were almost consistently wrong - not a provider issue, not a broken circuit issue, etc. It got to the point that I was bitching so loudly that my boss got sick of it, took me aside and told me that if I don't like something that the help desk is doing wrong, then fix it. So I did. I took them all in groups and taught classes on how these particular circuits work, where Bell's responsibility lies, and where our own individual departments come in to fix them. Within a week, my ticket load had dropped by 20%.

I wrote the below post before this incident took place, at the time where I was thinking that the only way to deal with my scheduling problem was to find a new job. Once I started to understand that fixing my problems instead of ignoring them was a much better tactic, I started thinking of ways to get around not having a social life because of my job. To that end, I vowed to get myself promoted to a position that allowed for a steady 8-4, Monday-to-Friday workload, even to the point of putting it into my OPR as a goal to accomplish. Within two months, I was the Team Lead. Don't ever say a little hard work now doesn't pay off later.

Enjoy.

Friday, April 20th, 2007, 2:21AM:

So, I'm working this morning. Yup, a graveyard shift. They suck, mostly because there's nothing to do. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm keeping myself occupied (at last count, I'm watching "The Shawshank Redemption", tooling around on Facebook, scratching out this blog entry, testing a T1 for Bell Mobility and waiting on Telus to give me some test results for a PRI), but even though that sounds like a lot, it's really not and it doesn't leave me with much on the go. I have my iPod, so I can listen to music, but no one's calling me for anything, no tickets are showing up in my queue. There's really not a lot of "test centre" things to be done.

That's what I do now, by the way. I work in a network test centre. I take data circuits (mainly T1's, but some 10/100Mbit and fractional T1's) for customers and troubleshoot them if there's a problem, trying to find faults in the physical continuity of the cable.

Anyway, back to this. What sucks about being on a midnight shift is that I'm the only one here. There's not enough to do to justify having two people on, so there's only one. And it gets quite lonely.

Doesn't make for much of a social life either, and that's the worst part. I'd love to be able to say that the company I work for recognizes I have a life outside of work, but I can't. Not in my experience. Because of this stupid shift work I can't make plans based on any kind of consistent schedule, I have to make sure that all my plans revolve around whatever shift I may be working on any given day, and I'm not able to do the things that my friends are doing on their days off because I'm usually working.

For example, this weekend, my roommates and friends are going out to a cabin to celebrate a birthday. I would have loved to go, but I'm working. Yup, I'm working three graveyards in a row and tonight's the first one. I won't be off until Sunday morning.

I have to find a new job.

So, yet again, I'm not able to make myself available for a social occasion because of my job. I hate that. I'm not the most social person to begin with, and this isn't the best way to change that.

Whatever. I'm looking at possibilities. We'll see what happens.