Engineered to be infectious – One more time before the feeling fades

Hi,

My boss just asked me to go through our disposed machines and find ones that are still in warranty.  There were a bunch of machines that are about 6-8 years old.

Then I found a classic, ancient beast.  Look, it has a massive 40 megabyte hard drive!  And then, BONUS, I found a compact wireless mouse.  I decided that the best thing to do with the mouse was to give it to my girlfriend, M, to use with her laptop.

Sorry about the image quality, I was using my iPhone.

Today was a good day

I mentioned previously that I have been moved out of the main Service Desk office.  When we chose where to go, one of the guys was out sick.  Today was his first day back.  We split our project team amongst 2 places – an old server room and our “build room” – because we wouldn’t really be able to all fit in one place.  We thought he would prefer to be in the build room, but he didn’t.  I volunteered to swap with him, so for the second time in less than a week I have moved.

I don’t really mind.  I am now in the same room as one of my friends who was laid off last christmas with me.  I have finally gotten around to getting my music setup too, so now I get to sit and listen to toonz while I work.

Last post I said I had a busy weekend.  One of the events was cancelled, so I got a chance to just sit around vegging with a DVD with M.  The cancelled event was Karaoke on Saturday, which was supposed to be for a friend’s birthday (the same one I am now sharing the room with).  Turns out he went out and got very messy and forgot a large chunk of the evening.

M’s meeting of the relatives (or at least my Mum’s side) went fairly well.  I didn’t think there would be much of an issue, we are a fairly laid back bunch and the focus was on the cousin with the birthday.  It was good to catch up with everyone, though we will be doing it all again in 60-something days for the birthday girl’s sister’s wedding.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say for the moment.  I am mainly posting to try and develop the habit again so I don’t go AWOL

Whew, I have a couple of things on this weekend – not a whole lot, but enough that I don’t want to plan anything else!

Friday (tonight) I am going out to dinner with M, then onto a pub where a friend of a friend is playing with his band.  Shouldn’t be too late a night.

Saturday I have a karaoke birthday outing with a friend from work, it will probably kick onto the early hours of the morning.

Sunday morning (9am) I have a birthday breakfast for my cousin, who has come down from Dongara for the occasion (which will hurt after Saturday night).

The worst thing was that I forgot about tonight’s thing until lunchtime today.  I had hoped to just veg after working, but it wont be too bad.

I might try to find some time to post tomorrow afternoon.

On a completely unrelated note, I have done a heap of walking these last few days.  I guess I am averaging about 2-5km or more a day(I should get a pedometer).  Since I moved office I have had to go back and talk to the guys at the Service Desk occasionally – mostly because we didn’t have a phone – and go down to our build room (which is where the rest of my team are setup).  It could be a couple of weeks before the wiring contractor gets around to fixing the plug in our room so we have a working phone.  So, we have organised to use a loan mobile phone (cell phone for you of the North American persuasion).  Not the best solution, but it will have to do.  I am still walking around a lot more though – mostly to get out of the little, windowless room I am in!  I might look into getting a large poster or something for one of the big, blank walls.  The only benefit of that room is that it has it’s own air conditioner so we shouldn’t get hot in summer with that baby!

I finally got paid today.  It feels so good not to be broke.  Of course, a big chunk of it just went out again as rent, but I am still not broke

M should be here any minute to head out.  I suppose I should sign off and get out of my work clothes and into something suitable for the pub.

G’night

- Engie

Considering I work for the State Government, there is relatively little politics that I am exposed to.  So when it does hit me, it is usually a rather perculiar aspect.

I am typing this from a dingy little ex-server room that I now share with one other person.  The other 2 members of the Project I am employed on are setting up in another room off on the other side of the campus.  This is so that we are not in the “main” service desk room.  The reason?  Upper management (read: morons that run the place but don’t know how it works) are complaining that the service desk was dragging it’s feet and deliberately going slow on jobs to try and get more people/funding.

Now, before I moved out of the room, there were 11 people in there (and relatively cramped in there too).  However, the 4 of us are not allowed to do service desk work as we are employed for a seperate project and another person only deals with phone and 3G wireless modems.  Another is the Service Desk Manager.  So fully half the people in the room do not do Service Desk jobs.  So to help the upper management monkeys figure out that they aren’t faking it, we project people have moved out.  Problem is, we won’t all fit in the same room, so we had to split.

I think this place has entirely too many managers and not enough people actually doing work!

- Engie

Greetings!

I promised I would post again, so here I am.

As you may imagine, alot has happened since my last substantial post in March.  So much that I probably wont remember alot of it, so I am not even going to bother trying to recount it all.  I am going to restrain myself to recent history (the last month or so).

I finished the Bunnings contract in May and finally found new work on the 23rd of July.  The math on that isn’t all that pretty, so I try to ignore it.  One of the other guys that got laid off from the Ag Department around the same time I did managed to get a contract with them rolling out new PC’s to replace the oldest ones in the department.  Someone else left and he thought of me.  I indicated I was not otherwise employed and interested in going back (I actually liked my job at Ag, and the people).  The next day I get a call from the boss and the day after that I am working!

I still have a girlfriend, and that is still sounding really weird when I say it!  She left a few minutes ago to go home and get some sleep before work tomorrow.  I am wanting to go in relatively late anyway, so I am staying up.  We are still getting along really well.  Her mum still likes me and I helped them setup the Wii they got and recently a new 40″ LCD TV.  I am even going over tomorrow to have a roast.  I don’t know what it is about me, but mums and animals seem to like me?

I have been having trouble with my housemate.  M and I are looking at finding a place to rent together and she is seriously looking at perhaps buying a place.

That seems to be all that I can think of that is of any consequence at the moment.  My birthday was during my non-posting time, but that was pretty uneventful.  I am actually quite tired – it is 11:15PM at the moment and I have been up since 5:30AM.  I will try and post again soon.  Perhaps tomorrow afternoon when I am bound to be in the office by myself and looking for things to do

‘Till next you read!

Engie

(reposted at admin’s request)

I’m back . . . again. . . Sorry

I seem to go on haiatus quite a bit these days.  There is no excuse, really.  I wasn’t too busy.  I didn’t have much to write about, but then again I never do   I just wasn’t in the blogging groove.  I am going to try and get back to posting regularly.  Whether that is a couple times a week or whatever, I don’t know.

I am at work at the moment, which is a story in itself, I will post again later.

- Engie (the no longer missing)

I am in a bad place.  I have gotten so frustrated with the contract I am on that I am close to simply walking away from it.  There are not alot of jobs going around at the moment, even less in the IT field it seems.  I have been browsing the IT jobs on Seek and there seem to be even less than there were when I was looking around the beginning of the year.

The problem is twofold.  Firstly, the job is testing, not IT.  A trained monkey could do the stuff I am doing.  I sit around bored out of my skull and frustrated as a teenager watching the intro to Baywatch that I have pleb level access to the computer.  I am used to being the one that can get in and fix things, dammit.

Secondly, is a bit of a saga.  Go grab a drink and go to the toilet if you need, this will take a while.

• We were originally hired to do testing from January 27 to February 27.
• I was called a few days before being due to start the contract and told that we now wouldn’t be starting until February 2.
• We start work and are told that there is testing on other parts of the system that are still in progress and we can’t do our testing until that is done.  So part of the testing is to send out orders, so we create the 500+ that we need by February 12.
• February 13 they told us not to come in Monday or Tuesday, to call from Tuesday to see when to come in – because the other testing is STILL NOT COMPLETE and we have run out of things to do.  We will not be paid for the time we are at home.  Never mind that I have bills and commitments.
• We don’t come back until Monday February 23.
• Come February 26 and the other testing STILL IS NOT COMPLETE.  We get contract extensions until March 27 the next day.
• They promise us that the other testing will be finished on March 3, imagine our lack of surprise when it isn’t done.
• They finally finish this other testing late on March 10 or early March 11.
• Now the testing is complete, they can make a change to the Oracle system that we made all of our test orders on all those weeks ago and begin our testing, finally.  We go to Lunch on March 11 in a good mood thinking that perhaps that afternoon that we can get started.
• We get back after lunch and have a team meeting.  They broke the Oracle system.  They need to do a rebuild of the entire environment.  No backups have been done since February 16 (and there was even doubt cast on the integrity of that backup).
• We are told that it will take 4 days to fix the Oracle environment (I take this as a minimum estimate).  We are told there is a good likelyhood we will be sent home again.
• We are not sent home, but are instead put to work assisting another contractor with analysing invoicing and trying to cajole suppliers to use more electronic invoicing.
• I call in sick February 12 and 13.  I just can’t take this busywork and I have a little problem with my throat that I would usually ignore (but I can’t be bothered going in so I don’t).  They don’t pay for my sick days.

I admit, on the Thursday I overslept and got a call from my boss at 9am asking where I was (we start at 7), I told him I was sick and that I had overslept and not had a chance to call.  On Friday I called in at 7:05am and after my call was diverted to reception from my bosses phone, I left a message for him.  Apparently he didn’t get the message and called the recruiter that they contracted me from.  I got an earful from the recruiter but just couldn’t bring myself to care.

You see, the recruiter has messed me around as well.  I was given the wrong pay schedule, meaning I didn’t get paid when I expected to and ran out of money.  They had to give me an advance so I could afford petrol to get to work.  Also, it takes them 2 full weeks to process our timesheets and pay us.  We started in the middle of a fortnightly schedule, so it was almost a month after we started that I finally got paid.  They are an IT recruiter for f*$# sake, take a couple of the people that you would send out to other companies and get your f@*#$*& systems in order to pay your people properly.

So I am seriously considering just walking away from this contract.  I am fairly sure that sending us home without pay was not covered in the contract so they nullified it before I did.  I have absolutely no loyalty to either the company or the recruiter.  They were going to offer another 2 weeks extension so we had time to get the testing done.  Even if I go back tomorrow, I will not be accepting the extension.

I just wish I had the financial backing to do it.

Greetings, salutations, aloha, ola and all that.

Some of you will know me, some may not.  For those that don’t know me, I am Jason, EngieViral or just Engie for short.  I am an Australian geek in his mid-20′s living in beautiful Western Australia.  I have been known to dabble in poetry, short fiction, philosophical diatribes, rants and the occasional tutorial.

For those that do know me: G’day

I don’t have alot to add for the moment, so I will bide my time and build up to a more substantive post.

Ciao!