The new beginning

Moving to a new job at the University I once attended was a life changing course.

The slate was clean. I brought a mixture of customer service and technical skill to a small team that tended to have one or the other. I was on the "Service Desk" - the ITIL friendly name for a "Help Desk" but poorly named to be vague enough for any organisation looking to leverage it to do more than provide IT help. 

It was not a job I cared much for to be honest.

The infrastructure within the organisation was immature and lacked a lot of much needed functionality. 

Can't remember your password? You could only fix that by calling in. And that was a huge problem. Not only did we have our own staff and students, but we had external providers whose students would use our systems twice a year. They were typically foreign students and they often had no hope of getting in without help. During peak times, there'd be hundreds of them trying to call at once. 

When I started, the team was 4 people plus a team leader. After a while it was 2 of us plus the team leader, and the other was married to said team leader. That made child births, running late, etc., all that little more troublesome.

As we're drowning under absolute mundane fluff,  we're being told the outcome of surveys saying how efficient we are getting by on so few staff, and how delighted senior management is. As we're ready to go collectively go and remove their genitals. Except we didn't have the damned time. 

I managed to get seconded to second level support a couple of times. It should have been mandatory. It was the best way to really understand the environment. Eventually I was moved out to that team. And life was better. I was the only tech on a large campus for quite some time, and that was tough, but the work was better.

Then due to changes,  first and second level support become one. It was no longer better. Now I needed to answer the phone, check emails, manage 2 job queues and still do on site support. There were 2 of us trying to juggle both roles.

Finally a restructure occurred and the first level was moved off to a new team. I was back to second level, and able to function with some freedom. Over time our team grew, as did our scope. The biggest frustration become the first level support - despite them being a team bigger and better supported than we ever had been, the quality of what they were sending through was rubbish. The constant feedback from above about not pushing things back that they needed to know because "they were under pressure" was infuriating. These kids  had no clue what pressure was.

Eventually after a few years of that frustration and doing some post graduate work in CyberSecurity, I was offered a seat as a system administrator. Finally, after 2 decades, I was getting a chance to do what I actually wanted to do in the first place.