I liked my boss. Here was someone who did IT but was something else: a docent at the zoo, an amateur historian who got all his passwords from reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and likely quite a lot more that I never knew. Though not so old, he carried himself with a distinguished, grandfatherly air, often looking out at you over round-rimmed glasses. In way, he seemed from a different time, and when he invited me to his civil war reenactments, the light bulb lit.
He had the posture of someone somewhat weighed down in life, shoulders slumping a little more at the end until he left. He had moved up, taken over from the previous IT manager who (all I remember of the descriptions) liked to dwell in his IT cave surrounded by a maze of boxes, a gauntlet that prevented all but the most ardent of help-seekers from making their claim.
The place was neat and tidy when I arrived, thanks in no small part to the other senior engineer on staff, a rally car enthusiast with a characteristically practical, Pennsylvanian outlook on life.
I got to work deploying workstations, their first batch using Windows XP instead of 2000. Bear in mind we were now into late 2004. I had used XP in college, and exclusively at the Library this last half year. But not all departments were up to speed, and years later others would still be limping along on that tried and true platform.
I was handed a long checklist of items to set in the profile we copied out via Norton Ghost, many in the local security policy. When I had a free moment my boss recommended I check and see if we were doing the latest to secure XP. I went to NIST and otherwise scoured the internet for what I could find, where I encountered Group Policy. Where we lacked a true Active Directory environment, nonetheless I could still use GP's richer feature set, configuring it on my computer, and then copying the entire contents of my GP folder (what gets set when you configure from the template) to a new computer. I used it as a local security policy. I kept going from there, expanding what could be done, researching every new setting.
I was only half-time at Nursing. I also did web programming. I got it in my mind to re-do the web site for fun (it was truly an ancient mess) and when I produced something that looked much better, my boss took it down to the Dean's (CEO's) meeting and emerged with an order that I be brought on half time as a web designer. Two halves made a whole and I was now full time.
I would appreciate more later, that when my boss offered to do something on my behalf, it was done. When he said he wanted to promote me he went through the enormous paperwork and process (I would understand this when I later tried to upgrade myself, tasked by my COO) and I was promoted shortly before he left. He had apparently done the same with my senior colleague.
I ran into snags my first year with the new website. There were features I needed to use, but I needed a version of IIS that wouldn't run on the old server. I could upgrade the old OS on the old hardware, but my boss kept telling me he had a new server just for that purpose he wanted to get to. But he had a pile of other servers on his desk to configure before this. After months of delay I asked if I could take my shot at building it. He was happy to let me, and I put it on my desk. I became the web server guy.
One Monday I came to work and found the new web server missing from my desk. The old one had died. Over the weekend my boss, faced with the choice of an emergency rebuild or taking a chance his junior engineer's first server grabbed mine, plugged it in, turned it on and it was the production server from then on. It held up brilliantly until I virtualized it years later.
Some time passed as I flushed out the web site, took outside contracts with grant offices who saw what I could now do with their sites (I even learned how to photoshop the faces of faculty and staff -- a big hit), and refined the process for deploying workstations and servers.
My boss took an offer with another department. Just like that he was gone, leaving me and my senior colleague to adjust. The workload increased exponentially.
The school CFO came to us and let us know that we had a $32,000 pot of money unspent and that in one month as the fiscal year closed we needed to spend it (or face a budget decrease going forward). All, right, I volunteered. I couldn't count on what we would be given next year, so I needed to spend this practically. I never imagined how difficult it is to spend that amount of money when you're trying to get the most and long-lasting benefit. We did it. What I bought, servers, monitoring workstations, printers, would prove terribly useful even years after.
Next year's budget was up too. My senior colleague should have taken it, but he was busy working with users on their accounts. Ok, I'll handle it. I went down to the CFO's office and she gave me printouts of the accounting she did for us: funds, cost centers, my eyes swam. Then I went up and located the proposed budgets and accounting my boss had done on his end. These would be my baselines. What would we be doing for the next year? I asked the senior engineer and formed my own plans.
Finally, we were ready for the Dean's annual meeting where she and her board of department chairs reviewed and approved all of the section budgets. I had spent a month on this document by then.
This very sharp and imperious lady spotted the mistake immediately. I had multiplied the training budget by 10 without knowing. I was sent back to redo it all, come back in two weeks.
I never repeated that mistake. Every figure I gave her going forward was double and triple checked.
I have nothing but admiration for Dean Cowan. I'd never worked for an organization led by a woman before. She was as sharp as they come, even by my imperfect memory. Not the most personable, and very matter-of-fact. Come prepared or not at all. But if you came prepared it was generally easy to predict the outcome. She was very fair, as I saw it. She had a reputation for good fiscal policy.
We were not close and I saw her only peripherally as she succumbed to a relapse of cancer and passed. My boss, before he left, told me of a frightful phone call and having to rush down to her office to pick her up off the floor when she collapsed at work.
I sent her a note while she was in the hospital telling her how much I admired her. I didn't expect to know if she read it but my COO told me later she had and it meant a lot.
I can't say she was one of the best managers, even senior, I've had. She had her flaws too as I understood them, but she had a powerful impact on my own development. I couldn't help but admire her.
So I became the budget guy for my department and I kept a very careful table of accounting: everything we spent, planned to spend. The tables started small and grew more elaborate as the years went on, and I was enabled to track future and past purchases, responding in quick detail to the CFO's and COO's inquiries when they came. Every year and more often, I would sit with the CFO and reconcile her accounting and mine. Sometimes I had minor errors, more often (albeit still rarely) she did. Most often, one purchase had been incorrectly listed under the wrong cost center or fund.
The process became simple. When I needed to make a purchase I took the quote to my COO and confirmed it was necessary and in my budget. He approved it and I took it next door to the CFO who either processed it herself or handed it to her assistant. Two weeks later it usually arrived. Simple.
I had no idea how complex things would get in government-associated institutions in my later life. It wasn't instant gratification, but I knew the process, it got done, and it felt like it. I'm indebted to our COO and CFO for making it this way.
When it came time to approve significant changes or budgetary requests, I became the face of the department, interfacing with the CEO and the COO and the other exec-level persons. I was also about 25 years old. My senior colleague was about 45 and he had been there a long time. He was the trusted entity. It was a strange thing, but if the execs ever needed convincing I always asked my colleague to come along and he always did. I could explain the task and he could confirm it was useful or even necessary. I might have been offended at a seeming lack of trust, but if that's what it took to get the job done, I was happier with the job being done. And I felt generally trusted anyway.
I now had a number of projects on my plate and as I closed some I added others.
Immediately, after the budgeting tasks, I was confronted by two big items.
Our network was crumbling. My boss was paying $1000 per visit for Cisco consultants to fix recurring issues. Now I was paying it from my own pocket. This had to stop. I would need to learn the Cisco stuff. And these recurring problems, I had to get rid of the old Catalyst 5500s and upgrade. And I didn't know anything about networking.
We couldn't support Novell. My colleague knew enough to keep adding and deleting user profiles, but nothing about really supporting the servers. I knew nothing. When we lost a server, we had to hire a consultant to bring up our test server as the new one. He was fantastically expensive and we would use him for the next year or so. Thankfully, it was separate from my budget and I never felt the pain directly. I had seen what Active Directory could do at the library and other places. The more I researched the more I was convinced this would need to be part of the solution.
Part of the second, our storage was problematic. We were out of space and deleting files to keep pace.
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