0550
I wake up with one thought in my mind: I will see the eclipse of the moon. And I do. It is showstopping beautiful. Can you imagine—10 degrees C, ground covered with snow (at last!), dark sky, and the eclipse of the moon. It is really worthy of the early wake-up.
Get caught up on this week’s Admin Diary entries:Read Monday’s installmentRead Tuesday’s installmentRead Wednesday’s installmentRead Thursday’s installment
0730
I’m sitting in my room at our own office. It feels weird to sit here instead of the room I have at our client’s office. I think I’ve been away too much from our own facility. But, it is reality: My job is to work with our clients, mainly on their premises. The work there is done, for now.

Earlier this week, I told you about needing to complete a Domino migration project for a client. I could have completed it today, but I had to stay at our own office. On Monday, I’ll go to the client’s office and get that server up and running. Right now it’s being tested, but it will go into production next week. Since I’ll probably be in Ahvenanmaa then, I have been briefing my colleague on this project all along. I really don’t envy him. It’s always hard to take someone else’s place in the middle of a project. I can only hope that I have managed to tell him all essential information.

This particular project is planned, documented, and supervised quite well, which isn’t always the case. I wonder how much it would affect the TCO if all IT projects were run at least as effectively as this one? Usually, no one knows anything, but something is still expected to get done. And finally, we administrators or support people are responsible for the system running properly and on time.

1330
This day has gone by; I’ve been tinkering with one thing here and another thing there. Every time I get into our office (approximately five days per month), I have to enter my work time into our monitoring database, check my snail mail and e-mail, report to my boss about what’s happened since we last met, and so on.

This takes a surprisingly long time, and before I know it, the afternoon arrives and the “real” job is still waiting.

Just a minute ago, we were trying to track down a connection problem. Our chairman of the board occasionally can’t read his mail.

We didn’t find the reason, but I think it has something to do with the fact that his own PC is broken and he’s using a spare. Someone else has been using that particular machine, and now Notes is confused. When the COB (chairman of the board) tries to open his mailbox, Notes doesn’t know which mailbox to open. Another possible reason is some kind of problem with our network, which is more likely.

1515
This week has been very educational. I have written down little things about my everyday (job) life. I have learned that I still like my job, I’m lucky to have my family and friends around me, and I do have a life outside of the office.

There are times when all of us need “an eclipse of the moon” to realize that IT is fun, but life is so much more than just IT. That was the most important thing I learned this week.
If you’d like to share your opinion, please post a comment below.