Working as a computer technician at any company
can turn anybody’s brain into mush after awhile.
So there are times when you gotta blow off some steam…
The place I (used to) work, Sarnoff, put all four of us (One Help Desk Supervisor and three technicians) thru a three and-a-half month intensive course to get our Microsoft MCP+I and MCSE certifications in Windows NT-4.
“Define intensive, Steve.”
3/12 months, 3 hours a night (after work), three days a week.
The first break at 7:30 was a mandatory trip to Starbucks. If you didn’t go you would fall asleep, this stuff can be deadly dull. Especially after a full day at work.
Three desktop support technicians for about 900 users. It is a quarter of a mile from one end of the building to the other. Yes we keep busy.
Did I mention that classes ran from the end of November thru the beginning of March? Did I mention that there were 6 large hardcover books plus 6 somewhat smaller study guides? You haven’t lived till you have studied the arcane ways of the Windows NT domain structure while Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer cavorts happily on your TV screen. I was quite envious of that red-nosed venison burger, no doubt completely oblivious to the interlocking trust relationships in a master domain model implemented over a WAN with both dial-up and dedicated lines. Merry Christmas one and all!
Our teacher thru all of this, a wonderful guy with the patience of Jobe (Terry), had a bit of a problem during the Christmas break. His wife’s cat scratched him, he got a bad case of cat scratch fever (who knew that existed outside of a Ted Nugent song?) and landed in the hospital for a week. Terry is a former Navy Seal. His wife and the rest of the class found a great deal more humor in this than he did.
Terry Put up with a lot from us, and the only thing that kept us in check was our completely irrational fear that Terry would kill us with one of those special Navy Seal Kung Fu moves. You know the kind, Chuck Norris does it all the time, where he kills you with a flick of his index finger. Oh yeah, our other motivation, we had to pass all the tests. Fortunately we all passed (some sooner than others). As a thank-you to Terry for putting up with all of our moronic, adolescent nonsense we gave him a little thank you plaque.
Me, George, Terry, Bryan and Stefan
Fast forward a few months,
Spring is ending but not nearly fast enough. The class and tests are, thankfully, behind us. We all have a bad case of Spring Fever. Fortunately George decides to take a weeks vacation in the Caribbean. He leaves one Friday.
I immediately swing into action and place a whole box full of really big nuts that I found in the trash (2″ long with a 3/4″ head) in decorative positions on his monitor, keyboard, PC and other fun places around his cube. Just a simple Welcome Home” present for our buddy George.
Not to be outdone, Bryan added a whole bunch of intrinsically worthless AOL CD’s… Then it got out of hand…
 Entering George’s cube |
 Our Decorating Prowess
|
We found some styrofoam packing peanuts and glued them to two of his overhead cabinets, on one we spelled his name out in peanuts. It stayed like this thru Friday morning. Then I found a big box full of green packing peanuts. His floor was covered to a depth of 4 inches: The icing on the cake. Too bad I don’t have a picture of the final masterpiece.
Everyone arrived early to see his reaction. His mind was truly boggled. And in true George-Style he just cleared a small path thru the debris so he could get to his PC and it remained that way for a day or two. till the (no doubt totally disgusted) cleaning crew cleaned up all those styrofoam peanuts
I love my job!
Addendum: The obnoxious blog title was inspired by an article I read a long time ago about how headlines in news articles, videos, and blog posts were absurdly written as if by a copywriter with a bad coke habit and a love of exclamation marks and hyperbole. So I tried my hand at such a title. It’s the only one like that on this website.
Originally posted before I added WordPress to this site. Published date is approximate.