he rest of my team (based in Dallas) is getting a bit silly this afternoon in our chatroom, so now seems like a good time to update this long-abandoned blog and catch everyone up on what’s been going on in my life in the last 5 months. I apologize profusely if you’ve been checking in regularly to either this little bit of fluff or to the other blog (which has also gone fallow since January). So I’ll let a “Leading With Distinction”(1) video play through my headphones while I attempt to write with distraction.
I guess the biggest change in my life since I last sat down to type here deals with what I do for a living. You may all recall that I’ve been writing metrics reports for the last 4 or 5 years. That career came to an abrupt end on May 1st, when I accepted a position as a senior network support dude in the newly-created
Digital Life Service Operations group (DLSO). So what do I actually
do now? Your guess is nearly as good as mine.
Theoretically, the people in my group are tasked with supporting a series of systems that will be the background of my company’s new Digital Life (DL) product. Very little is known about DL at this point – even by those of us who are supposed to be supporting it. This is because it hasn’t really been released in the United States. There are about 20 houses in the country right now that have been outfitted with the DL hardware and those houses are our “alpha” test of the system. Plans are in the works for a much larger technical trial in Atlanta and Dallas beginning sometime next month (and, with any luck, my own house will be included in that trial), but – as an example of how quickly things can move in this business – a lot of the systems that DLSO will be supporting haven’t been invented yet. One hopes that they will be invented in time for the tech trials. So you might be wondering what it is that I’ve been doing for the last 17 days if my job is to support systems that haven’t been written. That would be a fair thing to wonder. I’ve wondered it myself for most of the last 17 days.
Basically, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about high-level systems architecture and process flow. So – if I were allowed to say, and I most definitely am not allowed to say – I could tell you exactly how the overall system is going to work; but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the individual components within the system that will make it work. And those individual components – the ones that I don’t know about – the ones that don’t yet exist – are the things that my team and I are charged with supporting.
How did someone like me wind up in such a screwed-up situation? I mean, I’m a generally cautious guy, right? I don’t just leap into things that I can’t handle and hope, right?
Well….yeah. I do do stupid things like that all the time. That’s how I ended up in Atlanta in the first place, remember? In this particular case, however, it wasn’t about being either stupid and/or overly-cocky at all. The road to today started during a staff meeting with the metrics group about two months ago, during which a new acronym – AGR – was introduced. I’m not going to say exactly what AGR stands for because, frankly, I don’t know if anybody at the company spends their days trolling the internet looking for blogs that say bad things about ATT. If there is such a person, I don’t want to make his or her job easier by including specific search strings in my blog, ya know? So I won’t tell you what AGR stands for, but I will tell you what it means. Loosely translated, it means, “There’s a damned good chance that TWD’s job is going to be sent to the Czech Republic by the end of 2012 because there’s a guy in the Czech Republic who’s willing to do TWD’s job for a salary equal to approximately 30% of TWD’s salary.”
So I made a phone call to the DLSO group, learned a little bit about the new product, and was offered a job about two weeks later. It was really that simple. I didn’t even formally apply for this job. I was merely curious about the DL product. When I was informed that my “interview” had beaten out 250 other applicants, and assured that AGR will not affect DLSO, I accepted the job. And there it is. For the last 17 days, I’ve been reading documentation – and writing some – for products that don’t exist.
In other news, the 30th annual NABBA championships were held in Cincinnati, OH, during the last weekend of March, and the weekend seemed to go pretty well. The Atlantic Brass Band took top honors for the second straight year and it’s nice to see a different band at the top of the pile. Prior to last year, the Fountain City Brass Band out of Kansas City had been on a 4- or 5-year tear. I’m not a fan of juggernauts.
In the First Section (the section in which my own band would normally compete), Central Ohio won for the 4th year in a row (5 out of the last 6 have gone to the COBB). I’ve started to give their director just the tiniest little bit of grief that she’s not moving the band up to the Championship Section, but she seems determined to stay where she is. Hopefully, the Georgia Brass Band will re-enter the contest next year (after a two-year hiatus) and, also hopefully, the GBB will knock the COBB kings from their thrones.
I also met and have begun corresponding with a delightful cornet-playing lady from one of the top-level bands. We shall see where that leads, if anywhere, but it’s nice in any case to have another friend with whom to talk about music and brass banding.
About a month ago, one of the feral kittens – from last year’s basket o’ feral kittens – had two feral kittens of her own (in the box that I built for them, no less). The cat, who I call Daphne, is a very sweet little girl and also very tiny. I honestly didn’t think that she was physically capable of producing offspring, but had been trying to tame her enough to get her fixed anyway. So when I walked onto the deck last month and realized that she’d given birth to two normal-looking kits, it was a bit strange. She seemed happy and healthy enough, though, so I started reaching out to friends to see if any of them were interested in getting a brand-new, never-been-used kitten or two. None of them were interested; but, as it turned out, I was a bit premature in my attempts to find the babies homes. Both of them were dead by the middle of the afternoon. At first I thought they might have died just from being too small – until I noticed that one of them had had its head separated from its body. I’m guessing that these deaths were not of natural causes. Daphne, however, has remained as sweet as ever, and I still plan to have her fixed.
Death in my little feral family is not limited to kittens. Fleck, one of my favorite older cats, appears to be ready to pack it in. He may have done so already, in fact, as I haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon. His weight has dropped dramatically over the last month and he doesn’t seem to be eating much. I suppose I could get him in a carrier and take him to be euthanized, but he honestly doesn’t appear to be suffering. When I saw him yesterday, he made a few little happy meowing sounds at me and kneaded the air while I scratched his head and tried to decide what to do about him. In the end, I decided to go the route described by James Herriott in one of his veterinarian books – I’ll let Fleck take a chance and see what he decides to do with it.
So as not to end on such a morbid note, I’ll point out that the GBB will be playing at the International Trumpeters Guild (ITG) conference in Columbus next week. This is sort of a big deal for the band, as trumpet players (and other brass players) from around the world will be in attendance; and the GBB has a pretty primo slot on the schedule. In addition to a number of standard brass band pieces, we’ll also be doing two works with soloists – two trumpeters from the Atlanta Symphony along with the trumpet instructor at the University of Georgia. All three are fantastic players and the band is also sounding very good as of late. It should be a good show.
I know I’ve said this countless times before, but I shall once again make it a point to try to keep this thing updated more frequently. If you’ve got ideas about what I can write about, please….bring ’em on!
The word of the day, by the way, is “pip.” As in, “There are a bunch of little birds and they’re pipping at me.”
TWD
1. Leading With Distinction is a program started within ATT a couple of years ago. Basically, it’s a series of assemblies, each headed up by some sort of senior officer, theoretically designed to ensure that everybody at the company gets all hyped up about watching senior officers lead assemblies. Each assembly is recorded and can be viewed later via a browser. Participating in the assemblies, either live or recorded, is required. As such, I would estimate that 98% of all employees do the same thing: start a recording and then do something else until it’s over. Just like those assemblies you had to sit through in high school.
