All in a day’s work
Just another typical day at the office yesterday. The big project was getting another blog up and running so I could keep all my notes on the Office 2003 beta in one place for future presentation to my boss, and as a side benefit, share them with my site visitors. Of course that work could only be done around the other events of the day:
A laptop that hung at startup. (Bad startup program.)
A Mac that wouldn’t communicate with the printer (corrupted fonts, maybe? We did get it to print again)
A PC that didn’t give the user the option to respond to emails. (Missing Standard toolbar)
Documented all these issues in help desk database that I created in Access awhile back.
Answered at least 3 emails with database questions, another one with anti-virus question.
Verified tape backup from night before
Checked Server Event Logs for “out of the ordinary” errors and bad logins.
Read through tech newsletters
Brainstormed ideas for my regular “Tip of the Week” to users. (decided to go with something about clearing up space on hard drives, seems we have a few people who never delete anything!)
Had a discussion with my boss about who should be responsible for certain database changes.
In other words, just another day as the one-man IT department! Although I didn’t even mention that the beta testing is actually being done at home, on my own time, with beta software that I paid the shipping fees for, since we don’t have a suitable testing environment at the office. (Small company, not for profit, I have a testing environment at home that I can’t get the funding for here!)
When you write it all down like that you really begin to see all the various little things I do to keep things running smoothly. I did this daily for about a month late last year and then presented the whole list to my boss and the President before my annual review. I really think that changed the way they view me. It didn’t get me more money, but it did get the tone of the review to be quite different than previous years. You might want to try it. 🙂
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