The Roller Coaster

I have survived my second day at the new job.  I called this post The Roller Coaster because I’ve been up into the “I’m so excited to have a new job” and down into the “My God, what did I get myself into?” a couple of times over the past couple of days.

Monday was great, actually.  I arrived to discover that my new, under 5 pound, 2GHz, 1GB, Dell Latitude D610 laptop was waiting for me.  I commenced to setting it up and was told the previous computer guy was coming by at 10 to go over some of the details.  I got the basics taken care of and went poking through my desk drawers.  I was pleasantly surprised to find some detailed documentation about IP addresses and passwords and such.  When Original IT Guy showed up, it allowed me to ask some more educated questions.

After asking about administrator passwords and getting an idea how the network was setup and secured, we went over to the clinic in Stillwater to see how the clinic itself and the “data processing department” were set up.  As he showed me around the corporate office, he also noted that we had several laser and ink jet printers that came with some of the systems but weren’t being used. After he left, I got most of my must-have software installed then went on a search for one of the laser printers.  Hey, if they’re just sitting there, I might as well make use of one of them.  I found a loose one sitting in a back room, placed it under my desk, then hooked it up and went to lunch.

After lunch, there were a couple of issues at the local office to take care of.  One of them was that the assistant to the President and CEO could not print to a common printer connected to a print server.  I did everything I knew how to do to get it printing. I reinstalled the printer, printer driver, and the print server driver to no avail. I installed all of this on my laptop and it worked just fine – but not on hers.

She mentioned that she had a printer on her desk for a while but, to boil it down, it was borrowed from another person.  It came down to her need to print for the President and the CEO being much greater than my need for a nice laser printer in my office so I ended up with a laser printer in my office for a grand total of about two hours.  Then, about 3pm, I was asked, “Did anyone tell you that you have an email address?”  Probably could have used that info earlier but it worked out.

One of the other problems I found out about was that data processing was unable to contact the servers in Tulsa, Shawnee and Lawton.  I knew the problem was that the routers were not configured to let them through – the problem was that the routers were also not configured for remote administration.  My day today was consumed with driving a grand total of about 240 miles to do about 10 minutes worth of work at each of the Tulsa and Shawnee offices.  I’m tired.

When I got back, I was lucky enough to discover that another employee has to go to Lawton tomorrow and is willing to fix the routers for me if I can walk him through it… which I can.  Whew!