Eye Opening

Working in the "public sector" for the first time in my life has been an eye-opening experience.

Shortly after arriving in Phoenix last July, I had the opportunity to interview with this agency for a desktop support position. They were beginning the process of rolling out Windows 10 to around 1500 users and while I would not be the one doing the actual deployments, I would be doing post-deployment cleanup work. While I didn't yet have any direct Windows 10 experience, it was still one of those interviews where you walk away thinking you've aced it and expected to receive an offer by the time you got home, but nothing ever came of it. "They decided to go with a different candidate, but you were their second choice."

Second choice does not pay the bills.

A couple months later the same recruiter sent me back to interview with the same agency (and same people within the agency) for a Service Desk position, supporting the increase in calls that were anticipated once the Windows 10 project was in full swing. (It still hadn't started.) I felt this interview hadn't gone as well as the previous one, so it was no surprise when the recruiter called a few days later to say they'd chosen someone else. That was fine; I really had no desire to work on a Help Desk anyway—much preferring to be hands-on with my users. That is, after all, how you form bonds with your customers and oftentimes come out of it with lifelong friends.

You can imagine my surprise when I got a call from this same recruiter shortly after the first of the year, asking if I'd like to interview with this agency again, this time for an "Imaging Specialist" position. It was for substantially less money than the other two positions and my initial thought was, "Oh hell no!" but since my unemployment benefits from Colorado were about three weeks away running out completely I said, "Sure. Why not? Maybe the third time's the charm."

As I reported back in January, after one of the most disastrous interviews I've had since being back in Phoenix, they hired me.

And what exactly does an "Imaging Specialist" do? In the simplest terms, they load software images (snapshots of entire systems with everything preconfigured) onto PCs. This is a relatively quick way of loading the OS and various applications onto the computers without actually having to run through the manual install process each time.

This position wasn't for something new they had in the works. It was for the same huge project that the agency initially told me about back in July that still hadn't gotten off the ground. They had originally contracted with an outside firm to supply the hardware and apply the agency's custom software images to the machines. But during the six months that transpired from my initial interview and the time I came on board in February, said company had succeeded in deploying approximately one dozen of the fifteen hundred machines.

Needless to say their contract was terminated, and the entire process was brought in-house.

Unfortunately, the in-house crew that was hastily assembled from former Service Desk staff had only one person on board who had any experience with the Microsoft Deployment Tool. (The application that was used for building and deploying these software images.) Perhaps anticipating the shit storm approaching, he hastily gave my boss approximately eight hours of training before transferring his ass to a different department.

Adding insult to injury, the software images that the initial outside company built for the agency didn't work; forcing them to hire a consultant from Dell to come in and fix things.

Needless to say, it's been an interesting couple months. My boss (who is new to a managerial position on top of all this) has been trying to train our Team Lead the voodoo of MDT so we can use it to reimage the older hardware in our inventory while working with the Dell consultant and the application developers to ensure that those images also work properly on all hardware platforms.

When you add an extra level of bureaucratic bullshit to the mix (the process for tracking equipment at this agency is positively labyrinthine), I can only sit back and laugh at the absurdity of it all sometimes.

As I've written before, this has given me a whole new appreciation for what the Enterprise Desktop Management team at DISH does so flawlessly on a daily basis.

I'm happy to report now however that all the kinks seem to have been worked out. The Dell consultant has gone home and we're ready to actually begin the project I was hired on for; that is, loading the software images on those 1500 machines so the techs can deploy them.

(My boss has also been so impressed with what I've been doing on a day to day basis that he's lobbying his supervisor to hire me full time. I'm fine with this, as I like the people I work with, the commute is a breeze, and it would also come with a substantial increase in pay—close to what I was making before we moved to Denver.)