a day in the life in IT

[icecream-guy]

SO YOU WANT TO BE IN IT?

it's not all bells and whistles, pay is good but comes at a price,  you've gotta love the job otherwise burnout is around the corner,

a few weeks ago, got up early, I drove in traffic 90 mins to get training 9-5. training ended late, another 90 mins drive back home, had to do a maintenance that night at 8PM, Got online around 7:30 check my email s from the day, check monitoring tools for any problems with the equipment I will be working with, (don't want to troubleshoot a pre-existing problem during the maintenance window), anywho, ran into issues, got finished around 1:30 the next morning, i got paged out a 6am that next day because the enterprise VPN was down. troubleshooted that for a few hours, and finished out the day and went to bed.

yesterday, worked regular day, has maintenance planned for 8PM, got online around 7AM, had a Cisco pre-scheduled event to fix a network problem, finally got an engineer online at 8:30, troubleshoot for a few hours, TAC couldn't fix issue, recommended upgrade to latest code to see if that fixed problem (needed a new change request to do that), got done shortly after 11:00.  around 11:30 got paged out, network device was down in DC, so I has to jump in the car drive an hour to the DC, took me about an hour to fix the problem, then another hours drive back home,  got back at home about 3:30AM. woke up for work, (a bit late) with about 3 1/2 hours sleep under my belt. was online for work about 9AM.  (did get some comp hours today).

[Dieselboy]

I've been struggling to wake up for the last few weeks. Sleeping through alarms. Not really like me. I've had a slight cough as well. Wondering if it's covid related. Spoke to a friend on the weekend and he's had something similar for the last few weeks also. Last time I saw him was a couple of weekends ago.

What did help me out though, last week I didnt leave the house at all Monday - Saturday. I think I popped out Tuesday or Wednesday to the end of the street for milk but otherwise, was joining the cisco webex meeting for the whole week 8am-4pm and thats it. I have a wireless gaming headset for my PC which was good on the call because it meant I could get up from my desk and go and make a coffee. Here in Australia we have these vitamins called "Arma Force" and it's for the nose/throat. When I had covid in UK I would take one of those in the morning and I felt pretty good by lunch time. I think staying home in the warm last week, eating plenty of good home cooked food helped.

I've decided to try and reduce money outgoing. I used to buy a lot of takeaway flat white coffee and they're like between $5 and $6 each. Coupled with buying lunches too at $15 minimum and then the afternoon tea or coffee = up to $500 a month just in coffee and lunch which is pretty stupid. So I got a Sunbeam mini barista coffee machine. I just grind my own beans and steam my own milk and it's often better than a coffee shop.
I also bought a Ninja Foodi multi cooker (pressure cooker, air fryer, steam cooker, plus 11 other functions) and literally everything I cook takes around 15-20 minutes to cook. Pasta meals are so easy now. Literally fry the onion, garlic etc and then bung everything in (uncooked pasta, chicken stock etc), pressure cook for 5 mins to cook the pasta and it's done. I made scones last week which came out pretty good too.

And then because I'm british and I still drink a lot of tea, the annoying thing is waiting for the kettle to boil. So I got a Westinghouse hot water dispenser and now I only wait 7 seconds for hot water


In the UK there is a rule somewhere that, if you work late then you're prohibited from working early the next day so that you get adequate rest. I'd be asking for paid rest time to recoup. Tiredness is so severely impacting and also subtly impacting too because often I dont even realise I'm making a mistake when I'm so tired.

[deanwebb]

Power went out at the building where our testing lab is located, so I was involved in getting things back online yesterday. Fun fact - vCenter works great for most things when accessed via my Fold 4 mobile. Consequently, I was able to to a good deal of work before I got back home to use my PC for the rest.

When you choose to "stay technical" you are also choosing for work to wake you up when there's an outage. It's going to happen, so learn to love it or get into auditing and governance, where you don't have outages, you just have to be obsessive about grammar and formatting.

I do a fair amount of travel and I love it when I've got a rental car and a room with a kitchenette. That means I can shop for my meals instead of having to go out if I want something hot. The account exec I'm working with prefers that way, as well, so we can work great together. Finding things that aren't pre-packaged means less sodium and other crap in my diet and I can feel better when I lay down at night. Good diet is part of getting good sleep!

[scottsee]

People still want to be in IT? A sucker's born every minute..

[deanwebb]

People still want to be in IT? A sucker's born every minute..

Better than being a lawyer!