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Well, from what I’ve heard “through the grapevine,” it looks as if there is a chance of me moving to three different deptartments: Food Science & Human Nutrition, Engineering Workstations, or Achitecture.  Apparantly, I’ll be doing a half-time position at 2 of these.  Which 2, however, has yet to be figured out (at least, that’s the last I heard). 

Of course, I haven’t heard any of this from my actual boss.  I’ve heard it 3rd hand from my Unit Contact at DIA. 

But I won’t bother you all with a fun topic about that 🙂  Instead I’ll talk about the beast that is half-time.  When I worked for

Benteler Automotive I essentially worked half-time at Goshen, IN and Fort Wayne, IN.  Well, actually it was more 3/4 time at Goshen, and 1/4 time at Fort Wayne.  Talk about a pain.  Granted, most of my time was spent in Goshen, because they seemed to have all the problems (also 3x the users), but working out a plan to hit problems in both locations became strenuious at times.  And then, if there was only a few things to do in Goshen, my boss would ask me to stay there in case other things cropped up while I was away, essentially taking my time away from the Fort Wayne plant.  Now, I understand that things will be different here at the University, since both depts will be have me for half my time no matter what.  And since each dept here is run so differently (especially the 3 that are my possibilities), it’s going to be totally shifting gears when going from one to the other.  Hopefully I’ll be able to divy my time up by days (i.e. 2 full days at one dept, 2 full days at another, etc), instead of half a day one place, half a day another.  I don’t know how well I’d be able to handle that. 

I’ll guess I’ll just wait and see.  Hopefully I’ll hear something about it before the 1st of July (when I’m apparantly moving).

What’s that you say, move depts?  Yes, it’s true, I’ve talked to the boss’m and have asked to be moved out of the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics (DIA).  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sit there with your mouth open.  I know that DIA is definitely one of the best depts on campus, and that you get all the perks when you work here, but alas, I still want to move out.  As I see it, there’s no challenge left in DIA.  Thanks to Nick and Bud’s foresight, and my ability to continue what Bud was trying to do after he left, DIA works as a well oiled machine.  In my mind, there’s also no need for 3 full time IT employees there either, especially since there are 5 students doing a lot of the day-to-day work. 

The only hard part that I’m going to have to work with is moving out of working in a “business” scenario, into an “academic” scenario.  Everyplace that I’ve worked worked at, including DIA, has been either a business or run like a business.  When I say business, I mean that computer users are just that, users on their machines, not administrators, and that the IT department controls computers and other IT related devices (networking, mobile computing, etc).  Now, here in the world of academia, it doesn’t necessarily work that way.  In many of the depts on campus, professors and other users of computers are administrators.  That means they can install what ever they want, whenever.  There is no baseline for what machines should be, or where they come from.  The machines are essentially stand alone machines with not centralization at all.  Now, for those of you that are systems administrators, I’m sure you’re just cringing right now when I say this.  Hell, I’m cringing.  Being a systems admin of a dept like this is like trying to battle an x headed dragon, when x is the number of machines and/or users you’re trying to administer. 

Also, many of the academic units don’t have any money, or at least they don’t feel like they have any money, that can be spent on IT related goods.  Things such as centrally housed servers with user data, backups, machine patching, and anti-virus goes overlooked in many of these departments because nobody has shown them the light, so to speak.  A certain part of me wants to be that person who guides them into IT bliss, but another part, the part that hears the horror stories from other academic system admins, runs in fear because it knows that it’s not going to be easy at all. 

However, I definitely don’t want to spend my time doing nothing here at DIA.  When I worked hourly at various different IT jobs, if I wasn’t doing anything, I’d just go home.  To me there was no point in sitting around doing nothing, when I could be doing other stuff at home.  Granted, I wasn’t being paid to do other things at home, but I guess that didn’t really matter to me.  I still feel the same way now, but since I’m salaried, I’d feel even more guilty just going home than I do trying to find work to do. 

I’ve talked to my supervisors, and they are aware that I want to move.  And hey, that was one of the perks of joining DS.  You’re not stuck in one place the whole time if you don’t want to.  There’s opportunity to move around.

Hopefully I’ve made the right decision.