Bicycle Race

On occasion, the city of Greenville plays host to a series of bicycle races that run through the downtown area. It can be a fun experience for bicycling enthusiasts of all ages, and literally tens of people show up to watch the event. Several city blocks are sectioned off for the races, and it just so happens that the building I work in is planted firmly in the middle of the race area. Since the races typically take place on Sunday during the day, this really only limits the number of people inconvenienced to whoever happens to be working 1st shift on that particular day. As it turns out, for the past two years, that lucky individual was me.

When they started doing the races several years ago, the event coordinators would contact...someone, who would contact our department supervisor, who would contact our shift supervisor, who would ultimately let us know not to park in the race area on that particular day. For the last couple of years, though, something has broken in that chain of communication.

Last year was the first year I actually had to work the weekend of the races. It was Sunday afternoon. I had already suffered through a particularly annoying morning, as the weekly maintenance window had not gone as smoothly as normal. As I was settling into what would hopefully be a dull remainder of the day, my attention was captured by movement on one of the outside security cameras. I noticed a line of bicycles pedaling around the northeast corner of the building. I thought this was odd, since they were going against traffic on a one-way street, and stepped outside to take a look. It was at this point that I realized how screwed I was.

My immediate response was a string of profanity that would make my dad both proud and ashamed. Anger properly vented, I started analyzing the situation to determine my next step. I had two objectives that I must accomplish: 

1. Free my car from the race area
2. Contact 2nd shift to warn them about the races

Contacting 2nd shift was not a pressing matter, as for some crazy reason, getting home weighed more heavily on my mind than where Terrance was going to park. It still was a requirement, however, because I wouldn't put it past Terrance to pull up to the building, see all the roads blocked off, assume we were closed, and go home.

It is important to the story to explain that our building has a fenced in parking lot reserved for the university-owned vehicles. This parking lot also serves as a secure area to park for our employees who work nights and weekends. As it happened, I had decided to park my car in this lot that day. This complicated my situation, as if I had parked in a normal lot, I could pull out onto one of the roads that was enclosed by but wasn't being used by the race, wait for a gap in the cyclists, then just slip around the barricade and park outside the course. In the secure lot, however, the only exit was onto the actual race course, with the nearest barricade being too thorough to get around.

So, I made sure the phones were forwarded to the dedicated cellphone we keep in the event we have to leave the command center, and went in search of an exit. I spotted a police car parked across the track from the front of our building and decided it was a good place to start. I waited until the coast was clear, then jogged across the road to the police. I explained my situation to them, and they suggested that I go talk to the event coordinator, who was set up in a tent further down the block. With that, the cops left.

I wandered down to the tent, and caught the attention of the first person with a clipboard I could find. I explained my situation to him, and he had me talk to a woman who was keeping track of the times. She told me the race would be over in about 10 laps and that I could move my car during the break before the next race.

Once my car was free, I came back inside, tracked down Terrance and told him where he could park when he got to work. While it was annoying that they hadn't let us know the race was going to happen, they were nice about it and accommodating, so I wasn't too bothered by the whole ordeal. 

So, when I glanced at the outside cameras this year and noticed bicycles pedaling by again, I was mildly irritated, but not overly concerned by the whole thing. I walked outside to the tent where the event coordinators were stationed and again explained my situation. This time, however, the guy I talked to seemed far more concerned with my accusation that they hadn't notified us than whether or not I could move my car. He explained to me in great detail and to great length about how it was not his fault and that he had contacted the people he was required to contact.

Biting down on my rising anger, I explained to the man that I really didn't care whose fault it was and that my primary concern was getting my car out of the race area. I offered him a compromise, suggesting that if he could find me a window in the race to move my car, then it wouldn't be a surprise late entry into the race.

No cyclists were harmed in the drawing of this picture

Surprisingly, he was very accommodating after that.

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Working the Weekend

For the better part of the last decade, I've worked at East Carolina University in the Information Technology & Computing Services department. It is hard for me to talk about my work. Typically, when I go into details about what I do, people's eyes tend to glaze over. So I don't talk about work much.

The simplest way to describe what I do is to compare it to the job of a 911 dispatcher. Your typical IT department is broken up into various teams that specialize in different aspects of the IT field. Some work on software, some on hardware, some on programming, some on data storage, some on networking, some on telecommunication, and so on. Pretty much the same way your emergency services break down into police, fire, paramedics, etc. So when something happens and one of those systems goes down, I'm the one who identifies the problem and contacts the appropriate response team.

Since there's no way to predict exactly when a problem might arise, our area has to be manned 24/7, which means that we have staff on hand on nights, weekends, and holidays. And while we thankfully don't rotate shifts anymore, in the interest of being fair, we still rotate weekends and holidays. So, every three weeks or so, I find myself working the weekend.

I feel like the last man on Earth sometimes.

A basic weekend at work for me goes like this:

Saturday:
07:00 - Pull into parking lot 30 minutes early.
07:10 - Convince myself to get out of the car and go inside.
07:13 - Load morning backup tape.
07:15 - Enter command center.
07:16 - Get shift turnover from 3rd shift employee on duty.
07:17 - Try not to get run over by 3rd shift employee fleeing the building like it's on fire.
07:18 - Make sure help desk call agent is active.
07:19 - Boot up antiquated laptop.
07:25 - Log into antiquated laptop.
07:30 - Check email and shift report.
07:32 - Check event logs for servers.
14:50 - Perform a walkthrough of the building.
15:25 - Submit shift report.
15:30 - Wonder where 2nd shift employee is.
15:35 - 2nd shift employee arrives.
15:36 - Pass on shift turnover.
15:45 - Go home.

Sunday:
See Saturday.

A typical weekend is very quiet. When nothing breaks, and no one has a reason to call into the help desk, I find myself with about eight hours to kill. While it may seem nice to essentially get paid to do nothing all day, that's not really the case. Since I have to stay alert, I can't really do anything too distracting, which more or less eliminates games, movies, and such from the list of things to do in my down time. So that pretty much leaves reading and browsing the web.

On a particularly dull weekend,
you can reach the end of the internet by 9:30.

Of course, then there's the weekends where things don't always go smoothly. The help desk phone ringing is not necessarily a bad thing. It breaks up the monotony of what can be an extremely long, boring day. Plus, the average call is usually a simple problem that can be corrected, such as a password reset. As for the rest...

Let's go back to the 911 dispatcher analogy. Your typical caller would be someone with a serious problem. Heart attacks, gunshots, robberies, etc. Then you start getting the calls that aren't really emergencies, stuff you wouldn't dispatch a unit to respond. Nasty paper cuts, sprained ankles and the like. We get those types of calls too.

The severity of a problem determines what I can do about it, the bigger the problem, the faster the response. If the network goes down, or a critical server crashes, I have an on-call list I can use to get someone working to restore everything. If the display cable on your monitor is messed up and everything has a yellowish tint, sadly, I cannot page someone to take a look at it. Some people understand that not everything is considered an emergency. Others, not so much.

Based on a real conversation.

Those who know me can all agree that to call me a patient person would be a lie. I once yelled at a baby for crying. But when dealing with the people on the help desk phone, I do maintain a professional demeanor, no matter how hostile the person may be on the phone.

Also based on a real conversation.

And no matter how much I want them to just get to the point.

You guessed it, based on a real conversation.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the types of people who call 911 because McDonald's was out of chicken nuggets, or because their mailbox was looking at them funny? We get those too.

*sigh*