Have Clue - Will Travel - Stories

What is a 'Good Job'?

dhankins@mercenary.net (David W. Hankins) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:47:31 -0700

More importantly, how do you know you've done it?

It recently occurred to me that the way networkers measure performance is a little different from the rest of the world...
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The effects of Tar

dhankins@mercenary.net (David W. Hankins) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:56:43 -0700

I've been trying to think of a good story to tell about the time I spent working at Erol's, a dial access shop in Virginia that ultimately got purchased by RCN. It's not like we didn't have a lot of fun times. I sometimes miss the egg sandwiches the shop around the corner made...and man the homefries. It's also a bit precious in my mind since, after my boss sent out the URL for our NOC webcam to an Ascend users mailing list, one of the other users asked, "Do you guys work in a trailer park or something?"

Indeed, he had us pinned. A massive warehouse style trailer park.

It just doesn't seem to me that many of those random, funny events, make up anything resembling a good story.

I do remember one day in the summer one of our Points of Presence up north went offilne inexplicably. We dialed into the router, and this was back in the day of V.35 (not integrated CSUs on the routers) so the best we could do is see that the interface was actually hard down. We kept a telco guy on staff who lived up north, so these facilities were a shorter drive for him, and wound up sending him to have a look.

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Cutting them Loose

dhankins@mercenary.net (David W. Hankins) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:27:00 -0700

I once worked for a small company called 'Hawaii Online'. A handful of technical staff and a director of marketing whose best and only words on the subject of market research were "if you build it, they will come". We got bought by a Telco (because that was the in thing to do back then), and as you might easily be able to predict, some number of us got "convinced" (read: screwed) to leave the company of their own accord, some got fired (including me, I'm proud to say) and the small remainder came to live in Portland, Oregon where, we were told, they would build the next great Internet backbone. That didn't work out - the company's leadership pushed Nortel contracts (that's a whole other story...) so they could build bigger company debts and embezzle more of the company's hard assets...this was eventually found out around the time the company went belly up.

So for a stretch of time, I was the only 'operator' at this network. I was given a small staff that we hired up from the tech support department - one man still in Hawaii who had been doing 'hands on' stuff for us and a lady in the office with me in Oregon. Their names are withheld to protect their guilt, but I've always fondly thought of them, as any evil overlord might, as my 'minions.'
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Cats and Equipment

dhankins@mercenary.net (David W. Hankins) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:15:02 -0700

In Hawaii, the network operators had to be creative. They were all startups, and didn't have the cash to buy buildings and build up datacenters.

I worked for one company that struck upon a clever idea; business relationships with answering services. They'd let us buy some phone lines, and house our gear. It was perfect because these small companies always had a large amount of copper lined in.

There was one answering service on Maui, which I was sent to first after I was hired. It was kind of a hazing ritual. The owner and operator was a unique lady who lived at the answering service with an amazing cat.
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Causality

dhankins@mercenary.net (David W. Hankins) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:20:00 -0700

We were staying late in the Skycache NOC one Friday - it was Software Upgrade Day - the day that we put the next version of uplink software on the satellite gear, and upgraded all the downlinks. We tried to do this late at night on Friday so we had time to sort it out before Monday if we caught a glitch. I don't think we ever did.

The NOC employees mostly all smoked. Probably if you had that job, you would too. The rest of us didn't think it was fair that they got to take regular 5 minute breaks off work just because they had made a conscious decision to poison themselves, so we all went on a smoke break - even the non-smokers.

We were standing out in front of the building on Laurel Avenue, enjoying the night sky with the large satellite uplink dishes behind us, when we heard the generator spin up...and all the street lights around us flickered into darkness. We glanced through the window - our lights were on - no problem then...may as well just finish our smoke break.
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Packing Peanuts have Many Uses

dhankins@mercenary.net (David W. Hankins) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:03:00 -0700

I had the pleasure of working with a lot of cool people at a company called Skycache in or around 1998, which later changed its name to Cidera and went belly-up. Pity.

One of them was nicknamed "Mag". It's short for something. I'm not going to talk about that. Think of him fondly as a sort of caricature of Stimpy.

While I may be the sort of person who, when idly wasting time, might think up horrible things to do to people, I would never actually do them - I just think the very notion is funny.

And while Mag may be the sort of person who, also when idle, might love to do horrible things to people, he can never think of anything.

So separately, we're both mostly harmless, although possibly not angels. Together, we're a recipe for catastrophe.

And one day, we were left unsupervised.
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Once upon a time...

dhankins@mercenary.net (David W. Hankins) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 20:57:06 -0700

How did it all begin? I guess it was 1994. In real life, I was sitting in my college dormitory, Moodie House, in Washington State University. My Internet self was sitting in the living room at Jay's House MOO. MOO just stands for MUD, Object Oriented, so now presuming you know what a MUD is, you can realize this is all just a fancy way of saying I was wasting time.

Rocker, a strange man who operated a network in Santa Cruz called SenseMedia Netcasting, was complaining loudly that Usenet News administration was something he had never tangled with, wasn't sure how to go about setting it up, and really didn't want to if he could help it.

"Well, I could do that..." I said.

Unfortunately, he took me at my word.
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