I actually think Calandale was talking about Hadron. I haven't seen you misuse any quotes yet.
You have a career in computers? What do you do with them?
Thanks. But at least I know to watch a little more carefully.
What I do is actually something of a depressing topic for me. I work for a small company on contract to the USDA. When I originally started there, 5+ years ago, I was the system administrator for a software development team. There were maybe 25 or so developers and management with their associated workstations plus several servers. Nothing too fancy but it was all my responsibility. The USDA itself had their own tech support department but it had always been a joke and considered as such. This was why my company hired me in the first place. Several other groups had similar arrangements.
However, over the years, the government has slowly been consolidating their administrative and support roles into their group and forcing those of us who were doing it on a small scale to relinquish all authority we had. So, bit by bit, my roles and responsibilities have been reduced. For the most part, they haven't gotten any better at it either. For instance, they still have yet to roll out XP Service Pack 2 (they claim it's still being tested).
These days I pretty much have just one role, a virtual form of 'box it and ship it'. I still get the occasional technical question or problem from coworkers who remember what I used to do and hope I can help them without them having to call LAN Support and open a ticket (up to a full day wait time for responses). Unfortunately, I usually have to tell them there's nothing I can do and that I could even get in trouble for trying.
In all honesty, I'd probably have been fired long ago except for two things. 1) I earned the respect and trust of one or two key government managers in charge of our project. One in particular has gone to bat to defend me at least twice. 2) I have a reputation as a fixer -- every now and then, the seemingly unsolvable problem will crop up in a server or our development. Even though I lack any authority to directly fix them, I can usually just intuitively track the problem down and at least tell others where to look.
Oh my, this was a bit long-winded. Sorry about that. Guess you found one of my hot-button issues.
