Wow, it's been a while.

My job has been eating my brain, but in a good way. It's a great fit. Finally, I don't ask myself, "What am I doing here?" each workday. I don't have to beat back the specter of the Emperor's New Clothes during my waking hours - you know, the one where you walk around terrified that someone is going to realize it's all a sham?

Well, maybe not you, but this kitty had it, and in spades.

My current job title is 'Service Operations' (shouldn't it be 'Operator'?) I work at in a part of the company that provides a service for pay. Big companies pay us big bucks (or so I've heard - Service Ops folks aren't the ones who handle the contracts) for the online service we provide.

What this means for me is that I get to wrangle about a thousand machines. It's not that bad - most of the time, those machines are well-behaved so we only have to log onto the ones we are upgrading or otherwise performing maintenance on.

Most of the time, we're gathering data about the machines and putting them into spreadsheets and databases and presentations and documents. I spend most of my days documenting our stuff.

My programming background comes in handy. Compared to my peers at my last job (in Software Test for the same service department) I was a sucky programmer. Here, because they're all systems administrator types, I'm pretty good.

Each Friday we have a 'maintenace window' - that's when the contract we enter into with our customer stipulates the service will not be available because we're working on it. We get from 6PM to midnight to do our damage and get the boxes up and running again.

I don't have to work every Friday, though I have worked the past two and will likely work at least one of the remaining two in this month. I'm the FNG (something New Guy) so I figure it's good to show the flag and all that.

This past Friday I had a chance to shine. We had another team's developer there troubleshooting his product (that integrates in with ours, hence the tie-in) and he was having a difficult time. He asked me, during my time in Test, did I see a certain error.

We took a look at his program, looked at the documentation that the Test team used, and I pointed out that he was doing 'foo' when he should be doing 'bar.' He recompiled his program and it worked perfectly.

He loved it so much he sent an email to my boss praising me.

See what I mean? This is the perfect job for me. (Or, if it isn't, don't tell me and let me enjoy my bliss, however illusionary it may be.)

Hugs, all!