My Work

I've been the head technology guy in my school district for five years, and in that time I've had to deal with lots of little crises that have popped up: a router that died at one school. Corruptions in databases. Administrator computers that have pooped out. I'm always reminded of Judd Nelson's comment in the movie The Breakfast Club when he's accused of taking the screw out of a door that causes the door to slam shut: "Screws fall out all the time. The world's an imperfect place!"* In the same vein, computer systems are made up of physical pieces of hardware, and sooner or later the pieces are going to fail. The world's an imperfect place.

One problem I haven't had to deal with, though, a bullet that I've been able to dodge, is the death of a server. For some reason, that's the gold standard in IT. When people talk about crises they've had to deal with, whether it's the Internet going out on the first day of school or a construction crew running over a fiber optic line or a bulb from an LCD projector blowing up and catching on fire (all of these things have happened), the question that always comes back is, "Have you ever had a server die on you?" And I've always been able to say no.

Until yesterday.

One of the oldest servers in the district, a server that I actually have had it in my crosshairs to replace for about 18 months now, finally bit the dust yesterday. And I had an out of the district meeting all day today in Owenton, so I really didn't get a chance to work on it. So I'm going in to work on a Saturday, something I rarely ever have to do, to try to fix things before school starts Monday. It will be an adventure. I try to tell myself that situations like this are growth opportunities for me. I won't be nearly as freaked out the next time it happens as I was yesterday (and truth be told, I wasn't nearly as freaked out yesterday as I was when the first crises I faced came upon me).

And I was just telling someone the other day, one of the fun things about my job is that--most of the time--I get to decide what I'm going to do with the job. I'll look at my calendar and I'll say, "This morning I'm going to work on the District Technology Plan, and this afternoon I'm going to configure the new Power Over Ethernet switch for the middle school."

But on days like yesterday and tomorrow, the job sort of dictates to me what I'm going to be doing. "That might be what you THOUGHT you were doing today," the job says, "but I have other plans for you..."

I actually love crises, though. 

Of course, if I can't get the essential data recovered from this server and get a suitable replacement in place ASAP, I may not be loving it so much Monday. 

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*Never mind that his character really DID steal the screw.