Work

As it says in my profile, I work for UT Austin Athletics as an IT. I will honestly say that I love my job. It's good people, good pay, and good scheduling. I am able to design and organize my work schedule around my class schedule without any problems at all. But the single best thing about my job is that when I'm not out and about helping fix computers, I am in our storage closet of an office (no really, it's a storage closet, it's even labeled "storage") sitting in my wheelie chair, playing on facebook or on this blog as I am now. I love my job.

My supervisor, Hatty, is pretty cool and has great taste in music. It's interesting to see what new color her hair will be every couple of weeks. Currently it's blue, but I'm thinking green next time. The other student ITs, Loc-Uyen and Maanit, are really nice and friendly, though not extremely talkative. My boss is a friend of the family and has known me, literally, my entire life. I think it's rather nice to have a boss that you're comfortable talking to and can share non-work things with. There are another two employees with us in this storage closet, but other than general greetings and the occasional geek moment, we don't talk much.

I have definitely learned more about computers in the past few months than I ever thought possible, and I realize now that when I thought I was proficient with computers at the beginning, I was seriously mistaken. My normal week consists of imaging (or ghosting) new or refurbished computers, newSIDing and asset tagging said computers, applying crap-tons of updates to these computers, and then moving and setting up aforementioned computers to their new homes. We then take the old computers and either start the whole thing over again, or do something called a "boot and nuke" which rewrites everything on the computer with series of random nonsense 1s and 0s. Boot and Nuke takes FOREVER! It goes about .01% of rewrite per second and it does seven passes of rewrites. Added to all this, we will go around the athletics department and fix problems or install needed software to peoples computers, though Hatty does most of the fixing, I just stand and watch. She has sent me to install stuff and apply updates on my own, but it's rather difficult to mess up doing such a simple task. The only reason we do it is because no one else has the necessary Admin access. It sounds busy, I know, but I really do have a lot of extra time just sitting around.

It is completely fantastic and I wouldn't trade it for any other job on or off campus.