Today is my last day at Tommy Bahama. I’ve been training my replacement this weekend for Glen, he’s a pretty capable guy. I showed him how to work everything, where all the shares were, and all that Jazz. He’s a net admin during the week, from the sound of things he’s just looking to save up.

I’m glad to finally be done with this place, My life has pretty much been at a stand still since I haven’t been able to really do anything with Helen since I started working here, during the week she is in class, on the weekend I’ve been at work. Next weekend we’re going to go to a Drive-in theatre to watch Ironman, which is going to be tons of fun for us! I’ll at long last be able to sleep in, and have a day off (haven’t had one at all this month).

I’m currently sitting at the desk behind the new guy with my laptop, apparently he didn’t quite comprehend what I meant be 15-20 calls max over the weekend :p

Oh, and we had an ice cream social on Friday at Alaska Air, was awesome.

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

It’s take your kid to work day at Alaska. There’s kids all over the place.

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I’ve been working basically non-stop for the past few weeks. After I turned in my resignation letter, I started work, since then I haven’t had a day off. While I don’t really mind that much, it would be nice to be able to have a night out with Helen sometime. The Job has been going really well, I’m getting along with everyone great, there is an absence of micromanaging, so I feel a lot more productive.

Last week I wrote a script for running a general system maintenance. It’s just spybot, ccleaner, and jkdefrag, but everyone loves it. At first it was really basic and you had to copy it over, but I’ve been reading up and I customized it a little to where it works really well. I presented it at our staff meeting on Friday (which I was late too. The one day I’m late!) and the helpdesk manager basically went squeee over it. It was interesting having the meeting, especially since there’s no table, just a bunch of cushiony chairs which is pretty darn cool.

I’m starting to ramble a little bit since it’s kinda a late, so I’ll just leave the post at this for now. I’ll post more about everything later this week.

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Things got a wee bit busier then I would have liked. I’ve been working at Tommy Bahama on the weekends, so my personal life has been practically non-existent outside of Helen and a couple other people. My work with the Ubuntu US Teams has been put on hold too because I can’t attend any GSLUG meetings to stay on top of things.
I’ve finally finished my on-campus classes. I’m currently taking CCNA classes online, so it’s a bit easier. I’m taking a quarter off while I finish up some stuff from last quarter.
To add on to that, I’ve finally handed off Circle K to some pretty capable people, I’m still there though, just serving in advisor capacity, but they’ve got a good handle on things.



That’s a really brief overview of how things have been. For some more up to date stuff, I’m leaving Tommy Bahama, I want my life back, and I don’t want to end up working in retail support for the next few years. A good chunk of the experience I have gained from there is in retail systems, and I want to be working in technology systems, or at least something that’s a bit more widespread or has more security.

I enjoyed working with the people there, I just didn’t see them, if ever. I only saw them when I came in on my own time, so that doesn’t even count. All my communication was through phone and I’ve seen less then 30 people on the weekends since I started.
So a few weeks ago I decided to start job hunting. It started out as just looking around to see what was out there, but when I realized that for only a slight variation in job duties, I could make significantly more. Plus I was really not challenged at all by the job, everything I did was incredibly mundane and basic, the tickets I got that were more interesting, I couldn’t complete due to lack of resources. And to add onto it, I’ve slowly been going into debt since I have been making barely over rent+bills.


Anyways, after interviewing for a few weeks with little results (was even interviewing with Google at one point, but the interview process was 3 months), I got a call from a staffing agency I had interviewed with a couple years ago. I chatted with them on the phone a little then came in for a quick update on things then I had an interview on Monday with Alaska Airlines, and I got the job!
I’m really excited to be working there, today was my first day and everyone I’m working with is really awesome. Everyone I work with really knows what they are doing and it felt wonderful to actually be able to speak to them without having to dumb things down, I loved it. I also didn’t have to be reserved and quiet until I got my bearings, I pretty much hit the ground running and was chatting it up with everyone within my first two hours there. So far it seems like it’s going to be a great place to work.

There’s going to be a learning curve though, they use different software for pretty much everything, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to learn it all quickly, Lisa, one of the people who works there, walked me through some of it and I understood it fairly quickly. I even got to go out in the field and do a repair on my own. My manager, Matt, seems to have a lot of confidence in me already, which feels absolutely incredible, there’s no second guessing or asking if I can handle it, when the issue came up, he just said “Let Ahmed do it, I know he can handle it.”



That’s what has been going on so far, I’m really hoping this becomes a permanent job for me, I’m currently a contractor, but I’m going to do my best to make myself known and to impress them more then ever before.



By the way, here’s a picture of my in the cockpit of a flight simulator. That’s right, I got to do a take-off and landing of a 737 jet at sea-tac airport, and then a landing at the Juno, Alaska airport.

(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)