On July 6th, I reported for duty with my new IT help desk
job. Ironicaly the
contractor firm I'm currently working under suffered a loss at my hands 8 years ago. Back in the days, the company was only 4 employees strong, myself, the boss, another coworker, and a secretary. After spending a month working at the firm 8 years ago, I was'nt paid for my effort, specificaly, designing an accounting software for the firm. I got fed up with the ill treatment I got from my boss and coworker, before leaving, I formated the hard drive and left. Boss was full of rage, he threatened to call the police. Be my guest, can you prove anything? Too bad you never heard of unformating before. Besides, copyright laws were already taking shape in
Saudi Arabia and I don't think the authorities will be pleased when they learn that you guys have been selling and renting pirated CDS.
Eight years later, a friend of mine starting working for the now 50+ brain power strong firm. Management is totaly different now. My friend kept harrasing me on a daily basis to join him in his work, I was too lazy to join in. My friend was him self being harrased by the new boss, who went to college with me, to get me to join into the firm. The new boss friend got his managerial position after the old boss was arrested on terror charges. We both thought our college diplomas are only worth to be hung over the bathroom wall, but we were wrong. Seem like the majority of firms take work experience and how good you are in the job more seriously than how many degrees you hold. But we are still persuing our bachelor degrees just in case.
I love my new job. Level of formality is extreemly low. We get to cuss at each other in the office. Pay is good. And the network I'm working on is huge. Our firm is contracting for
Aramco, the oil company. There is a joke going on around here, that we are a mosquito sucking off an elephant. Aramco has a class A network for its intranet site. The number of active machines I've seen in active directory at any one time is 70,000+ and growing. I've seen 3200+ different subnets. We watch 4 live graph projectors on the walls showing us real time info of all the important links between cities and buildings. We have domain controlers, complete with backup domain controlers in
Dhahran,
Riyadh,
Jeddah,
Houston,
Dubai,
London, and
Tokyo. As people can tell, I get excited for a minute and then the excitement goes away. I was excited to learn that we have 2 links, 250 mbits each, to Houston, for all our internet needs. Both links are utilized at 50% combined, if one goes down, the other will handle the load. There are also many dual fiber links running at 2.5 gbits in the intranet site. And around 30 mail servers. Simply put, the network is a mamoth.
My job function ranges from reseting users passwords to trouble shooting computers either through the phone or through netmeeting. Trouble shooting telephone lines, fax lines, secure id access cards, printers, routers, and whatever type of new problem may arise. We have 3 levels from bottom to top, agents, professionals, and specialists. I was placed as a professional. Some of the new recruits got jealous when they learned of my new post. I usualy respond with, "Do you have previous work experience?", and "have you been MS certified since 2001?" I get a no in both questions. When I first got my MS certifications 2 years ago, I thought to my self, "what good will this bring me?" Seems like it became useful after all.