To understand completely my circumstances that surround my posting schedule you must understand how my time is spent. First is family, all my time other than when I am at work is spent with and/or around my beautiful wife Shawna and adorable son Nickolas. So that leaves the time that I am at work. I work the night shift for a company that does IT support for many medium to large business. As one could probably guess there isn't much to fix while everyone's sleeping. Mainly I watch a screen that is lit up with little Blue, Yellow, and Red boxes that indicate the status of servers and network equipment. in this way I can determine if a problem happens during the night and hopefully fix it before anyone knows it even happened. This way everyone can sleep soundly knowing that I am watching over their computers. This and what ever random task they feel I can complete during the night is what comprises my schedule while working.
With this schedule you would think that I would have plenty of time to make posts while also maintaining the integrity of the networks that I monitor, and you would be correct mostly. When I first started this blog I and a most helpful coworker who would assist with completing all the tasks that needed to be done during the night while also helping to maintain the sanity of us both by providing another person to talk to. At some point some one with the authority to make changes came to the determination that the position I held was completely achievable by one person. While this is true and I have no problems completing everything I need to do with time to spare there is a connivance for both me and the company to having more than one person on a shift. You know like if I'm sick or in capable of coming to work there is some one else here to cover or you know when I would like to take the day off.
So at any rate rather than paying two people to do the job of one they moved the person who was working with me to the day shift. I don't envy him for moving to days rather than me in fact I prefer it this way for a few reasons mainly I get paid more for working at night and the fact that they thought that the day shift can be handled by four people instead of the ten that were doing it before.
It seems I have a tendency to go off on tangents... My main point is that I have less spare time while working so this means less posts.
Hey Clark. I just finished reading your blog in it's entirety and enjoyed it very much (even the things I didn't quite understand seeing as I am rather uninformed about computer stuff). Just to add my two cents - I pretty much agree with you that most social media outlets are a big waste of time. And I agree that reality TV is an even bigger waste of time. I think that the purpose of both is to satisfy the innate human need to be heard. I, like you, am not one to talk a lot, unless it's something that I either care about and/or have a strong opinion about. Because I am a rather quiet, reserved person (especially around people I really don't know), people are often surprised to find that I have some very strong opinions about certain things. I think that most people do, and most people are less content to keep their opinions to themselves. Although there is definitely a benefit to not saying everything that comes to your mind, and I am just now figuring out the value of not keeping everything to myself. I think the trick to figuring out how to use social media correctly - basically what to share with who and when. I am appalled when I hear about people updating their status to say something like, "At the alter, hold on while I say 'I do'," or posting, "Just gave birth to a beautiful baby - two minutes ago". The real problem is when posting about your life becomes your life. Maybe I hate social media too and didn't realize it until just now?
ReplyDeleteOne more quick (maybe) thing....I love words, and when I come across a word I am not familiar with I usually will look it up (even if I can infer it's meaning from the context). So when I came across the word "connivance" in this posting I checked it out - even though I figured it was a typo and that you meant "convenience" (for both you and the company). So I was surprised to find that it is an actual word.
connivance |kəˈnīvəns| noun
willingness to secretly allow or be involved in wrongdoing, esp. an immoral or illegal act
That is the other problem with social media. Although I can often express my thoughts better in writing, when you don't have face-to-face (or at least voice-to-voice) communication it's hard to know if your message was received in the way you intended. So I'm left wondering if you and your company were "secretly involved in wrongdoing" or just think it is more convenient to have more than one employee on the nightshift (but not really).
Okay, so that wasn't quick, but I did enjoy reading (and responding) to your blog today. :)
~ Shara
So, I just spent 20 minutes typing a response to this and when I went to post it was all lost because it was too long. Maybe I will type it up again sometime, but for now I will just say that I enjoyed reading your blog today. Because, like you said, you are a quiet guy, it's nice to hear your thoughts on things. I'm not a real talkative person myself (especially with people I don't really know) and so people are often surprised to find that I have such strong opinions on things (certain things anyway). I'm not a big fan of social media myself, but I think it serves a purpose. It fills the innate human need to be heard (and seen?). The trick is just figuring out when, where and especially what and with whom to share. The problem is when posting about your life becomes your life!
ReplyDeleteI just noticed that when I posted the second comment, that the first one was actually accepted after all. As you can see, when I do choose to say something, I have a hard time stopping. One of the reasons I don't say much sometimes is because I feel like I really ramble on once I get started. :)
ReplyDeleteI may have more opinion in some matters than I have words to describe them with. That combined with little proofreading and relying on spell checker results in a few typos but it's an interesting catch on that word.
ReplyDelete