Network Geek Blog

I slept on Kenden's floor last night, as the kids and Wendy were in our bed and I didn't have the heart or energy to move them. He woke up fussing several times and eventually joined me on the floor. We all had a hard time waking up, and I was a little late to the team meeting. My biggest fault at work is my punctuality, but I justify it because I work so many late hours and on the weekends. But it's still not a good habit and doesn't reflect well, I need to work on that. The network at the hospital has grown by leaps and bounds since I started there in 2001. Back then I support 40 devices at Good Samaritan Hospital only, and there was 3 of us. Now I support 500 devices across multiple facilities and there are only 5 of us that do the day to day-to-day work. Jim is the architect and stays busy doing high level design projects, James does all the project management and administration work. Dave, Rik, and I do all the support work, with James' help in his oncall weeks only. Ed is oncall 24x7x365 on cabling work and manages our cable vendor. Now in 2005 we have a new wireless infrastructure going in on all campuses. It's only going to get harder and harder to maintain our level of service. I have offered up a solution to make this smoother as I am really trying not to complain, but offer solutions. One day I hope to be in a position to make the decisions that will allow us to support all this equipment in the best way possible. We have a good management team and they'll make the right decisions when something like a major outage gets their attention. I'm learning that sometimes with budgets you have to make do until justification for staff or financial increases is certain. I feel that day will come soon.

I have a major install to accomplish tomorrow, I'll let you know how that goes. MJ.