DAN’S BLOG

Well I haven’t blogged in a while so I thought I’d post an update.

Christmas was nice. Mark and David came over but their parents stayed home because they were sick. Steve, Sudi, Lucy, and Bob came too. Steve gave me a painting of Tiger that he did himself. It’s based on an actual photo of Tiger. I like it a lot. Lucy brought me some more of that really good Abuelita chocolate from Mexico that I like. We ate real turkey as well as vegan stuff. Mom and dad picked up a new dominos game called Highrise on their way home from their last trip; so we played that game as well as some Mexican Train.

Today is New Year’s eve and I am going out to Joe’s Aunt’s house near SWC along with the usual group of friends. I have tomorrow off work, yay.

I’ll post pics here of that later on probably.

Ok pics are on the next post.

This is a continuation of the previous post.

Monday, December 11th, 2006 was my first day of work and orientation class at SAIC. Orientation class ran all day from 8AM to after 2PM. That was a really long day. I sat through lots of presentations from HR, Security, Safety, Benefits, etc people and learned all about their strict ethics standards, employee ownership options, and lots lots more. After orientation was done and all my stacks of paperwork were filled out, I went down to the security office to have my photo ID badge made. I have an electronic badge that opens certain doors as well as the gate to get out of the parking lot. I’ve also got a nifty smartcard for working with encrypted e-mail.

The past two weeks I have been learning my job. I work in the NOC (Network Operations Center). Using all kinds of utilities and monitoring programs, we monitor thousands of networks and locations all around the world. Most are internal SAIC sites. But we also monitor 4 other companies/organizations’ networks. My job is mostly taking with “customers” and “carriers”, creating trouble tickets, resolving network issues, and eventually I will get to program CSU’s and Cisco routers to be deployed to new remote sites. Right now I am still learning what to do. It’s all very complicated and my coworkers tell me it takes months to really feel comfortable with this job. There are about 11 of us but I have not even met everybody yet. The NOC is staffed 24/7/365 days all year long. No matter when you’re reading this, rest assured there’s probably at least 2 people in the NOC right now. This means that because I’m the new guy, I’ll get the crappy hours as soon as I become useful to them. No matter, they are thinking of hiring another person still. hehe.

I have my own cubicle with a laptop and a desktop. This past Thursday we had a potluck so in the pictures below you’ll see some food sitting out. Normally the consoles at the front of the room don’t look like a buffet table. LOL. Also it’s all decorated for Christmas.  Normally most all the lights are off.  We like it to be like a dark cave in the NOC.  I took these pictures with permission and they don’t contain any “proprietary” information. So enjoy. Let me know if I left any important details out.

Alrighty. Here it is. I’m blogging about my job. You can all jump up and down with glee now. This is the beginning of my adventure.

At the end of January 2006 I took and passed my CCNA exam. I then spent from February through to the end of May at MicroSkills doing their four ITP (IT Practicum) hands-on exams as well as taking the 2 week Camp MicroSkills class. I started looking for a job in June with the help of Darren, the career placement guy at MicroSkills. He sent me tons of e-mail job leads every week. Many I didn’t really like. Some I checked out. I had a few interviews here and there.The first Job interview was with a very small consulting company. I jumped the gun and blogged that I had the job. I could have had it too but I decided it wasn’t for me. After that I decided I didn’t want to blog anything at all about my job search until I really did have a definite job. Mainly I didn’t want people saying “oh good luck!”, “congrats!”. “horraay!” and stuff to me every single time I went on an interview or even perhaps got a job but then not have to work out. I’m sorry for being so quiet lately but I just didn’t feel like posting on the subject at all until it felt right.

My job hunt continued for months. 6 Months in fact. It totally sucked. Ya it’s nice to have all that free time but the longer I went without a job the less money I had left, more lazy I felt, and more rusty I got with all my skills. That makes finding a new job harder with time too.

As all of you know, on October 20th MicroSkills disappeared. This means that so did Darren who was helping me find a job. At that point I figured I would apply for positions at a company called SAIC. I had heard good things about it from students and staff at MicroSkills in the past. I never got a response about the first position I applied for. But the second one cought someone’s eye.

I managed to get a phone interview for a Network Analyst position. I thought I was prepared for it but I was wrong. I’d never done a phone Interview before. I thought I had totally screwed it up royally. I was so nervous and I began to really mess up when they started asking technical questions. Amazingly they called me back later and wanted to schedule a live interview! That one went a whole lot better. Then end result… I got the job!

In the next post I will talk about the job itself.