My boss and the CEO, after sharing a bottle of scotch, decided to give me a bonus. $772.89. Not too shabby. However, the government decided to take $303.20. So I actually received $469.69. You know what we need? More national pushback, resentment, and debate over taxes. We need armed uprisings over economic and taxation grievances. We need violent political protests involving government spending and financial decisions. I don’t know if this is directly related, but why are there so many potholes in this city? I wish I could volunteer my taxes to go to certain infrastructure projects. I heard that Australia has a system where each tax payer receives a document outlining where their taxes go, is that true? Why doesn’t every nation do that. Oh wait. Of course. Everything at scale is corrupt. Every single industry. I hope A.I. joins us in our tax revolt.
Category: work
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Had a Teams call with a coworker and manager. My manager gave an update on the new facility in farm country USA that he recently finished setting up (IP address, firewalls, switches, printers, workstations, etc.). Lots of work. He said he was proud of us because we did excellent work to keep operations going here while he was away. It was nice to hear. One of my favourite things to do while at work is to open random apps and spread them out over the three screens I use so it looks like I’m deep into research. What I’m actually doing in periodically refreshing the helpdesk ticket portal and scrolling Twitter on my phone. You know real work. I work when there’s work to be done. Don’t get me wrong I’m learning a lot about how they do business here and when there are tickets for me to resolve I do my best to fix them. But when there’s no work to be done I make it look like there is. This is how to survive in an office. This is my life now. For just under 50k a year I’m doing the baseline amount of work I feel is worth it. Who knows, if I get paid more maybe I’ll work harder. Maybe.
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Closed my 50th ticket as a newbie IT helpdesk dude. What the hell is an ERP had to learn that it is an Enterprise Resource Planner also what the hell is that. Oh right it’s a “a software system that integrates core business processes – such as finance, HR, manufacturing, supply chain, and sales – into a single, unified platform.” Okay so what the hell do I do with that. Turns out the hardest part of my job so far isn’t troubleshooting Outlook or Teams issues which are usually resolved with signing out and signing in again or restarting the app or doing an Office 365 Reset/Repair, no, the most challenging part has been figuring out the terminology/technical jargon and workflow of the ERP that this company uses. Get this, there are reports. These reports have versions. And there are programs that generate reports and these programs have their own versions. Thank goodness I don’t need to be an ERP expert. I just have to gather enough info from the end user and send their request to the ERP support ticketing system. Basically I’m a helpdesk that submits tickets to other helpdesks. A weird symbiosis of business processes. Sounds boring I know. But I’m just happy to be getting Work Benefits now that I’m forty years old. One more week and the Work Benefits kick in and I can start shitting the bed and being lazy at work. Just kidding. Or maybe not we’ll see.
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My boss has 12 Bitcoin. Currently that’s $1,157,478.72 USD. He was wearing a twenty five thousand dollar watch today. One of many in his collection. Get him talking about watches. That’s how I build rapport with him. Smile nod and say things like “wow” and “no way.” Let him talk more than me. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind chatting about watches and I wish I had an expensive hobby like collecting top tier timepieces. I have a $40 Casio. My most expensive hobby right now is jiu jitsu. $135 a month. I’ve only gone eight times in three months. No wonder I got my ass kicked last time I went to open mat. Speaking of ass kicking, I have a $600 vet bill coming up. My older dog needs an eyelid tumour removed. Poor guy. I’m sure he’ll be fine. I bet if I had mined Bitcoin in the early 2000s like my boss did I would be able to afford a hundred dog eye tumour removals. C’est la vie. Así es la vida. Such is life. Maybe next time when I’m reincarnated as a sysadmin I’ll be rolling in cash. Here’s hoping.
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Turns out I did get sick. Bummer. Just a cold. Probably should have got the flu shot. Maybe next year. Maybe. Well at least I get to work from home today. I already closed two tickets, the users email signature was formatted with borders when it’s not supposed to be and only when they were replying to an email. Found a temporary fix, took some screenshots, and sent them a How To so they can manually change it themselves when they reply to an email. Even if they don’t do that who cares. They can still send and receive emails and those issues were more Cosmetic and didn’t interfere with the users job. Fuck em. Happy to help. Working from home is pretty sweet. This isn’t the first time I’ve done work-from-home. I did it during the lock-downs. Don’t get me started on the lock-downs. Working from home then was good then it got rough. Because I was smoking weed 24/7 and it really got to me. Picture this, getting out of bed five minutes before having to be in a Zoom meeting. One minute before the meeting starts ripping a huge bong hit and blowing all the smoke out while pressing the ‘join chat’ button. Those were wild times. But now since I don’t smoke or drink anymore I think I’d like to work from home. Maybe in the future. Maybe when my wife and I have children I can work-from-home doing IT tickets and be a stay-at-home dad. That’s the dream. That’s a good dream
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My boss walked into my office eating from a small bag of potato chips. He whispers that he wants me to sit in on a termination of an employee (firing) so I can see how it’s done. I’m nervous. He showed me how to remote into a computer with the command prompt open and then shut down the computer using “shutdown /s /t 0 /f” that is great power to have as a sysadmin. They do this so the person being fired doesn’t go on a rampage and damage the system or delete company assets or try to break in to the building at ten o’clock at night and smash windows and break a photocopier machine that costs tens of thousands of dollars while also carrying an eight inch blade. Apparently that actually happened once here. That person was promptly arrested and spent a few years in jail, also due to some prior arrests. This will be an exciting week.
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Big changes are coming in the next two to three weeks. That’s what my boss said today. “No matter what anyone says, your job is not affected.” Okay cool. Then I wonder who’s job will be affected then? Interesting. Does this big company-change result in me making more money? Probably not. Will the company make more money? Probably. As long as the tickets keep coming in, I’ll be here. As long as people get locked out of their Windows account, I’ll be here. As long as people don’t know how to fiddle with monitor cables to get their displays working, I’ll be here. Unless a certain President starts world war three. My boss was also opining about how the snagging of a certain Venezuelan leader will kick off a shit storm the likes of which the world has not seen in the modern age. Maybe. People writing about a “maniacal leader” with their own “personal marauding gang” will take what they want with no one to stand in their way. Damn that’s cool. I wish I could write like that.
As long as I stay employed and can feed myself my wife and my dogs I’ll be good.
There and Back 