So the new job. It’s boring right now. I don’t have the access to do the things I need to be doing so it’s roughly a job where sitting and staring at the wall is the complete and total norm. I run some service calls with other engineers (a misnomer) but mostly it is sitting around and trying not to fall asleep. The same can be said for those with access to tickets right now. We are overstaffed but that doesn’t mean my job is in danger. We are overstaffed for a reason. A reason that none of us actually know but will likely find out tomorrow during a meeting.

We have lots of meetings. Monday morning and Thursday afternoon are pre-scheduled and then there are other random meetings in between. It’s pretty corporate. Of course at a company this large everything is corporate in nature. We service a specific set of clients on a specifc set of operating system with a very specific scope of support. Some days we are just ticket jockeys making sure the right departments get the problems that were assigned to us. Other days we are lifesavers to the clients. There won’t be anything challenging here for me as the scope is so limited but I think that will be alright for a couple of years.

I don’t want to stagnate so I have to find new projects. Since karaoke is a hobby of mine I plan to learn C++ by writing a karaoke suite for Linux. By suite I mean player, cataloging, ripper, and so on. Once it is done I plan on making it a bootable CD distro. A complete karaoke system by just putting a CD in your box and rebooting. It’s actually a very huge project to be honest but I have been wanting to learn C++ for a long time. I could do it in perl most likely but I want to have a nice compiled system that is graphical and can be used by a novice with a simple reboot. I have to decide on KDE or Gnome but that is academic to be honest. It will work on either when I am done so all that matters is what libs I want to use.

So the drudgery of daily work in a large corporation carries on. Evidenced by the fact I had time to write this post to begin with. This is not a fast paced environment at all. Everything moves through levels of bureaucracy with such quickness it reminds me of an iceberg. That is not to say that the job isn’t important but rather to say that my job has absolutely nothing at all to do with affecting any change. All I have to do is make sure the clients OS and hardware are working right and then hand off to the right group. I have to do this rather quickly according to those that work here but our SLA is pretty laughably far out. It might seem fast to those used to a corporate environment but to those of used to demanding clients this is a cakewalk.

Maybe I’ll take some pics of the new office digs and post them later. Of course I will have to edit out all of the indentifying marks since I am not saying where I work but that takes mere seconds. I am off to stare some more at the wall and maybe read more Sluggy.