So that is my department's motto, not a commentary on any particular personal drama du jour (although it seems appropriate for both). My pager came today, so I managed one week of carrying just one cell phone like a normal person.

Incidentally, I also broke said cell phone by throwing it at the wall when it dropped a call at a most frustrating time for about the eighth time in ten minutes. So now it is very slightly less useful. It is also worth noting that this Motorola phone, a piece of crap in every way, did not survive a minor collision with the drywall (I did not throw it very hard, being a model of self-control), whereas my old Nokia phone was dropped on a sled track, run over repeatedly, reassembled at the bottom, and still works. It just looks like hell. I don't know what I can do about the fact that T-Mobile is worthless here, however.

Other than that, I feel like I am making progress. I can now understand maybe ten percent of what people say, up from one percent on Monday. I am getting better at defending myself against the approximately 2000 emails a day that I need to read and occasionally do something about. (Real emails, not counting spam.) I had to finally give up pine, because I couldn't possibly keep up. And fortunately Google does an amazing job of internal documentation and education, by industry standards.

I ordered my business cards and some Google stuff, which should be fun. I thought about changing my own job title to "Site Reliability Superhero" or some such, as some people have done, but decided it would be better to wait until I could make a reasonable case for doing so.

02 Feb 2006 18:46 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments