A new form of energy...

I'd like to discuss a new form of energy that I believe my organization is harnessing. In my department, I feel like I understand how things work. Not just the machines and policies and such but just the general flow of work. The NOC, where I work, is the first round of help. We're akin to emergency dispatchers. We'll help however we can but it's usually outside of our scope so it's our job to get information about the problem and pass that info along to the proper group. If it's a network/server problem, notify the Admins. If it's specifically a security issue, notify the security Admins. More often than not, it's a staff IT problem so we create a ticket and pass it along to our Support guys who contact the end-user and handle it from there. As NOC, we also support the other departments where we can. We run reports for the Admins, assist a student-run team designed to help other students connect to the campus network in the dorms or the wireless, and we assist the Support guys from time to time. We're all separate but together at the same time.




As far as everyone else in the organization goes, I couldn't tell you. It's the Housing office so naturally we have clerical staff, secretaries, maintenance folk coming and going as well as custodial staff out and about. Everyone else with a title is a coordinator of this or a director of that. My job title is NOC Assistant. I assist. Since their job title is Director or Coordinator, then they must direct or coordinate things, respectively. As far as I can tell, they just send email.

We had one specific issue where housing hall wanted to get one of those all-in-one printer/scanner/copier deals. They wanted it to be setup so that a resident could scan something and have it sent to their email. Nifty, right? It went through 3 or 4 people there at the office, then to me, then to my supervisor, onto his, onto his, onto his, onto the IT director, onto the Donald Trump, onto one of our state congressmen, onto the congressional floor, and got voted down by Republican majority. What amazed me is how important email is.

Personally, I get over 500 emails a day, easily. Nobody can pee without cc'ing me about it and I'm technically just a "part-time" employee. That's not to mention Cacti network/server alerts, Operations Manager alerts, VMWare vCenter alerts, our ancient and horrible ticketing system and it's alerts as well. Thank GOD that He gave Outlook the ability to filter these things into their own folders so I'm not bombarded all day with emails that aren't actually asking me to do anything. Sure some of them are but most of them aren't.

I believe I understand how this works though. The energy that we use is created by email. Hear me out. I asked our SysAdmins and they just laughed but didn't give an answer. I've heard that Powershell can do some amazing things too. Why else would we send so much email? If we didn't, the water would stop running, the coffee machine wouldn't work, the TV that shows soaps all afternoon wouldn't get reception, the lights wouldn't turn on, and the building it self might just crumble to the ground.

I have to get back to work. I can hear ceiling tiles falling because I've been writing this and haven't been sending email.