A Day in the Life of...

[Phoenix]

A while ago Drum_Dude had the excellent suggestion of a 'Day in the life of' thread, having been discussed a bit on the mod forum and recently ressurected by our new mod SimonG, I'd like to introduce this thread, and the format in which it will be maintained

to avoid the thread becoming a sprawl of tangled sub threads and responses, this thread will only contain the 'Day in the Life of...' posts, and will be locked

to submit an entry please PM me and I will add your entry, all comments can be made in this thread

So get rolling guys, I know we have school IT managers to consultants here, so lets get a bit of variety going

PM me those autobiographys!

Thanks to Drum_Dude for the top idea, and thanks to SimonG for bringing it back to life!

[Phoenix]

A Day in the life of:

Simon Graham
Network and E-Learning Manager

Firstly some background about where I work:
An 11 -16 School In County Durham
230 Client PC's (all XP)
4 Servers (All 2K3)
1 Linux Firewall (I don't touch it)
HP Procurve switching
Ranger Network Management software on top of Active Directory
SIMS.Net on SQL



The day starts for me at about 6:30 am, being rudely awoken by the alarm clock, a quick stretch and I'm into the shower to wake myself up.
By 6:50 am I'm alive and ready to head to work, but not just yet, just enough time for a cuppa, and sometimes some breakfast.

7:10 am and I'm headed to work. Work for me is about a half hour commute down the motorway and cross country. Arriving there at about 7:40am.
Once I'm at work then it's time to get my priotities right - Wash the cups out and fill the kettle! By 7:50 I'm usually doing routine stuff, making sure that the servers are running ok, checking the backups, changing over the backup tape. If everything is running ok then it's time to enjoy the cuppa, and catch up on my emails, browse CF, etc.

1st lesson begins at 8:30, and it's usually around now that I get the simple problems to deal with, "Sir, I've forgot my password", "I can't log on", "these computers are cr@p". This usually goes on throughout the day, as lessons change over and different students log on.

At 9:15am I get a phone call from a member of the administrative staff saying that she is having a problem doing something within SIMS. SIMS, for those of you that don't know is a school management system that runs on SQL. It contains all of the administrative aspects of the school, from Registers to Reports. As she sounds all panicked, and because I feel like it, I head down to see her.
She's forgot her username.Why she could'nt just tell me that over the phone I don't know! I log on, show her her username and reset her password, make sure that she can now log on ok and do her stuff then walk off swearing under my breath!

Back in my office at just before 9:30am James (the Technician) has already got the kettle on.

Whilst drinking my second cuppa of the day (I have tea at home and coffee at work, tea doesn't count!), I will log onto our school Virtual Learning Environment called Fronter. This is a new development within the school, that I have put all of the work into developing since last February. It went live to all staff and students at the start of Term, and has been greatly recieved by all. (It got me a pay rise!)

The eventual goal for the VLE is to have all of our lessons deliverd through it, but thats not for a while yet. At present it gets used for the storing of documents and resources, so that staff and students can access it from any where at any time.
It also has our school email system running on it, and an instant messaging element. Staff love the instant messaging as they can get hold of me when I don't answer the phone! Students have no chance of ever getting access to IM, as it's hard enough to get them to work at the best of times.

There's nothing much going on, or that needs fixing (James takes care of the basic PC repairs) so I start doing some work on planning restructuring our servers, as we need two new ones to replace old ones. Knowing full right that there won't be the money that I want to get two decent servers I'm trying to restructure for one 'Monster', and another that will simply be effectively an online spare. I'm also looking to moving around server roles to other servers to make the infrasturcture more efficient.

An hour or so on this, in addition to a few basic "my mouse won't work", "I can't log on" issues and I'm heading towards late morning, fast approaching lunch time. Time have a bit search on the web, and CF!

Lunch time arrives, and ironically as soon as I start to eat my sandwich you can guarantee that the phone will go, or there will be a knock at the door, or an Instant Message! The school operates a three split lunch system for students, so depending on their year group they get lunch at different times. This also means that Teachers get different lunches over the three slots between 12:00 - 1:30pm.
As expected the flow of people begins half way into my sandwich at 12:05. A teacher who's data projector isn't working, fixed in 5 min's, back to sandwich.
This usually goes on during the lunch break(s) and it all goes calm at about 1:30pm when the 5th and final lesson of the day begins.

This is usually the quietest time of the day, all of the problems have been fixed, everyone knows their passwords, etc, so on the kettle goes, and on the web I goes!

There's something going on after school that requires some IT setup, so after the cuppa ask James to head down and set it up. By 2:00pm as it's all quiet I'll head off on a wander to try to find work. Just having a look in the IT suites, seeing what the kids are up to, noting down websites to block (He He!), and chatting with teachers to make sure that they aren't having any problems.

With nothing found to fix I'll head back to my office and wait for the home time bell to go at 2:30. By 2:40 with all of the students now gone, and the teachers now beginning to drift off I can get some serious work done, as I can actually get into rooms to work. I say this, but there's nothing much really to be done today, just a BIOS update on all of the computers in a suite. James can take care of this.

As James is off flashing BIOS's, I decide to try and do some follow up on the Web Filtering post that I made here a few days back, nothing much, just gathering information about the product offerings, etc.

Come 4:00pm it's time to head home from what's been a quiet day. I really need to create some excitement in my job! The day, however is not over for me yet, and after a short commute home it's a case of getting changed then heading back out to univeristy. It's a Monday, oh great, that means Cisco, an evening of configuring routers with ISDN, Frame Relay, DCHP, NAT and PAT until 9:00pm.

By 9:20 I'm home, eating tea, and most probably on CF seeing what's been going on.