Working so hard.

Today marks the end of the first week working at my new job.

It’s a co-op job, i.e. co-operative with my university – meaning, I get university credit for it, and I get work experience for my resume, the company I work for gets cheap (that is, cheaper than a regular employee doing the same job) labour for a semester, so they don’t have to commit to hiring me forever, AND I get paid for my time. So it’s pretty much benefits on all sides.

Today I opened and closed my first ticket in the ticketing system – actually, my first ticket ever. Tickets, if you’re unfamiliar with them, are ways of reporting incidents (especially in helpdesk work) in such a manner that it’s easy to see whose the problem is, who’s reporting it, what the problem is, and whom it’s assigned to. You can assign it to someone specific, or to a group, and you can escalate a ticket by assigning it to someone higher up. Theoretically simple. A bit time-consuming in reality. But it gives management a good way to see statistics on what the IT department does and when. It probably took me longer to type in the ticket for the DVD drive replacement I did on Monday than to do the actual replacement, but hey. Just doing my .... job.

My coworkers are good fun – the two of them bicker like siblings. Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming, but I enjoy it most of the time – they do mean well, and there are some good jokes.

And then sometimes one has to deal with Users. Users are a special breed of human being. They don’t always do useful smart things, and in pursuit of making life easier for them, they don’t always make us do things that are useful or smart either. This I have learned after one short week.

But my day is almost over, and then I will go home and watch this week’s episodes of Castle and NCIS, because I went to Bible study last night instead of watching shows.

Toodles, all.