Warhead (I suck at the internet)

Report from Thursday August 17, 2006 - 01:00am

The new job is going OK, but for the last month I've done little more than prepare for the phone upgrade in our office (around 450 phones on 11 floors to be replaced over a single week end). We realised we wouldn't have time to unpack, assemble, connect and register all that lot in a single week end, so unpacked and put them on desks the week end before last, then connected and registered them on the network last week end. It wasn't just new handsets, but an upgrade to VoIP telecoms.

We cleaned out the old patch cables in the server room on Friday night, so I didn't leave work until 9:30.

Arrived at the office at 7:45am on Saturday to be told the lifts were shut down for two days for maintenance. We could use the fireman's lift, but that isn't automatic, so we had to get someone from on-site security to operate it for us, which meant either phoning them or trying to get them on the walky-talky whenever we needed to move up more than a few floors. This seriously slowed us down during the day.

Started registering phones at 8am and finished at 5pm, with still four floors to do on Sunday.

Started again on Sunday at 8:30am (cos I thought it would be nice to have a lie in), but things didn't go well, and there were problems with the links to the 19th and 25th floors. We buggered about trying to fix it, and most of the staff went home at around 5pm, but our consultant stayed on to try to solve the problem.

He spoke to his cable guys and asked them if they could come in at 6am on Monday to investigate the link problem, and maybe put a copper cable up to the non-working floors as he couldn't work out why the fibre wasn't working. They said it'd take around 5 hours to install copper and asked if they could come out on Sunday night and work through the night.

He asked me what I thought, and I said it was a better option than having two floors without phones for nearly half of Monday, but that one of our staff was required to be there while the contractors were on site, and as I was the only one left, it would have to be me.

As it takes around 90 mins for them to travel up from Telford, I said I'd go home for dinner and they could call me when they were 20 mins away from the office so I could drive back in and meet them. They called at 10:30, so I was back in the office at 10:45. By now the lifts were back on, so we could move around much more quickly.

They started installing the new cables, and I carried on snagging and preparing user guides. It took them until 6:30am to finish the install, and then I had to go and register the phones on those two floors. By then I'd decided there was no point in going home as there would loads of queries from users about the new phones, plus all the analogue stuff (faxes and the occasional modem) still needed to be patched, so I ended up working through Monday until 5:15pm.

I was in bed and knocking out zeds like nobody's business by 9:30 and didn't resurface until 7:15 am on Tuesday, for another full day of snagging and user queries.

I had Admin training all day today, so I know more about how to keep the thing going now.

I only have to make it to Sunday (working Saturday to remove all the OLD handsets) and then I'm off for two weeks R&R.

They're going to LOVE my overtime claim.

posted by Warhead @ 12:35 am