Its good to be back. It’s been over a week since my last post and I’m sure the small portion of the blogosphere that realizes I exist, has written me off for an abandoned blog by now. It’s been an ugly week, to say the least. I want to tell you the story of my bad week, and since it is tied in with my job, I’m going to pepper it with a bunch of technical geekspeak, but don’t let that get you down, you’ll get the gist of it.

It started off last Friday with this Voice over IP (VoIP) Project. My biggest contribution to this project was to set up a new VLAN on our networking infrastructure. Basically, instead of running a completely new infrastructure for the phones, we would use our existing data network, but we would create a Virtual network for the phones to operate on. Nifty idea, but we didn’t have any VLANs and I had no idea how to set them up. We set up a conference call with another division that had already implemented a similar set up. That was extremely helpful and by about 4:30 I had a plan together for what I needed to do. Unfortunately, it involved reconfiguring 15 switches. I spent the next 10 hours tracking down the relevant data about each switch reconfiguring it and documenting how I had set it up. What made it worse was my boss kept stopping in for “progress reports” on how I was doing. He was obviously impatient with the progress I was making. I explained that the fact that no one had documented how the switches were set up initially meant I had to: physically walk to switch, climb up and look at the back of it to get its MAC address, so I could in turn determine its IP address. This only ticked him off more, probably because he was the guy who deployed them with out taking the time to set them up in a standardized fashion or to document that set up.

Around 2:30 AM, I finished as much as of the set up as I could. I couldn’t go any further, because we still had contractors running cable and some of the switches were not connected yet. I would not be able to finalize the set up until I knew exactly how they were going to connect back to the rest of the network and there was some doubt about that because they were running short on materials. I brought my boss up to speed on where I was and discussed the plan for Saturday. When I got in my car and drove home, almost 20 hours had passed since I had arrived at work Friday morning.

I took a two hour nap and then got back up and went back to work to meet the phone contractors. When I got there, I found a note from my boss saying that they hadn’t finished cabling we would have to wait until Sunday to rollout the phones. I worked with the contractors to get the switch set up and go over some infrastructure stuff. We plugged in a phone and after trouble shooting some SNAFUs got the phone to work with the switch over my new configuration. After 8 hours or so we had taken care of everything that we could without the cabling being completed. So I sent the phone guys home and called my boss brought him up to speed, he said that the cabling would be done by Sunday morning. So I went home again.

My wife and the kids weren’t there so I figured I’d watch some movie on HBO and catch a nap. When I turned the TV there was no cable. This wasn’t really a surprise, the cable company’s, Adelphia, online payment system had been FUBAR for 2 months, and their customer service number for that only operated 9 to 5 weekdays. I hadn’t bothered to call them from work or to write out a check and pay it the old-fashion way. I called customer service and told a very nice lady how ticked I was about the service, the lack of HD, the inconsistency of the cable modem service. Then I let her debit the money out of the checking account so I could watch some TV. Star Trek:Generations was on one of the movie channels so I watched that. I never did get that nap.

Sunday morning I walked into work to find my boss napping in a chair in the lobby. He had been there all night with the cabling guys. He stayed long enough to make sure he had communicated with the phone guys and then he was out of there. I spent the day trying to set up the remote switches that were now connected, and answering questions and solving problems for the phone guys. We got all of the phones deployed and the trunks cut over by 4:00 PM. I sent the phone guys home, called my boss to update him, and then starting inspecting workstation to workstation to ensure that all of them were connected to the new cabling that was run. There was a lot of stuff that just wasn’t quite right, it took me until 8:30 PM till I got it so I was confident enough with the set up to leave for the night. For the those keeping score, that’s 40 hours in three days, a 72 hour week. Monday morning I got in at 8 AM (as usual) and my boss was pissed, I didn’t know why but I figured it was cause there were some lingering Cabling SNAFUs to get worked out. Monday was an 11 hour day (with no break for lunch,) troubeshooting and working out those little things that always pop up.

I felt pretty good about the project, I had learned a whole new technology and implemented it. I had been able to take care of the phone guys during they day while my boss took care of the cable guys at night. I was a little plucked that no one had bothered to say “thanks” or “good job” to me, but that’s life. Then Wednesday, my boss hits me with “he is not satisfied with my performance.” He gave some “verbal warning” because I did not complete something he asked me to do on Tuesday. I didn’t complete it because he asked me to take care of it around 4 PM that day, I made the assumption (apparently a poor one) that it could get taken care of Wednesday morning. I explained that and he said I should stayed until it was done. I told him that I had to leave at 5 cause I was picking a kid up from day-care. He intimated that day-care issues were no excuse. Then he told me that he was mad at me because I didn’t show up early on Monday. He didn’t ask me to come in early, he said it should have just been “instinctive.” He said he was so mad about it that he was unable to talk to me about until that moment, it took him two days to calm down. I apologized for not coming in early, I had no idea that he expected that. He was obviously still angry. He then accused me of not checking all the workstations Sunday night. Apparently, he had found one that wasn’t switched over. I explained to that I did check them all even the area in question. Maybe with all the hours worked I missed something or made a mistake, but I certainly had gone to every workstation. He didn’t want hear it.

I’ve been in this job for almost 4 years, and mostly I like it, but I’m getting the feeling it is time to brush of the old resume and find something new.