Remember when you were young, and staying up all night was the cool thing to do?

I have to say that work is going really well.  I absolutely love my new job, and the more I learn, the more I love it.  I couldn’t be happier.  The biggest challenges, though, stem from the lack of others doing their job.

Within two days of being added to the email distribution list for our group, I said to my new boss, “I’ve noticed a trend here.”

“Oh?” he inquired.

I went on to explain that I see a lot of the following two scenarios:

• “This customer is getting really impatient.  They needed all of these servers configured yesterday.  I know that our sales team just got the order to your group five minutes ago… but that doesn’t matter.  You guys need to drop everything you’re doing and take care of this now.”
• “Hey!  Thank you so much for all of the hard work and many hours you put into building these.  Unfortunately, though, I gave you the wrong information.  So I’m gonna need to ask you to undo everything you just did and rebuild them this way.”

It’s all good, though.  You can’t help but laugh at most of them.  My boss, although one of the most laid-back people I’ve ever met, is quite good at defusing these folks.

We got a bomb dropped on us last week, though.  An email went out to our team from our boss who explained that we have a huge customer coming in.  They needed their entire environment (which consisted of about 30 servers of various species) built out by Monday.  We got the email at 3 pm on Friday.  He had explained to his superiors that this wasn’t a realistic expectation, but he was instructed to ask for volunteers.

Me and the other new guy jumped at the chance to prove ourselves, as well as make some serious overtime money.

To give you an idea of the overtime I put in, I worked for about three hours Saturday night.  Then, I started back up again on Sunday morning at 10 am and didn’t stop until 7:45 am on Monday morning.  My only break was when I pulled myself away from my laptop for about an hour and a half as Jules and I went to eat dinner at the local Mexican place.

You wanna talk about “gittin’ er done.”  Everything was handed over to the customer on Monday, as expected.  I was also glad to see what a hard worker the other new guy is.  He kicked some ass.  Not only that, but my boss, and my boss’s boss were working right there with us too.  I had a lot of respect for that.  Most bosses would push something like this on their subordinates and go play golf.  Not these guys.  I was very impressed, to say the least.

Apparently, so were a lot of other people.  My boss came over to my desk today (since I obviously got to take yesterday off to sleep), and told me that “this really opened a lot of eyes, and there are a lot of people who are very impressed with the work we did.”

I told my co-worker that I was pretty impressed as well.  “For being the new guys, I think we kicked some serious ass,” I informed him.  He agreed.  There was sooooo much that didn’t go as planned (not related to anything we did), but we worked as a team quite well if you ask me.

Anyway, I’m gonna get to bed.  Hopefully, I won’t be pulling any more all-nighters anytime soon!