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老猫在纽约 (二)

本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛I was no stranger to NYC. My brother lived there for many years. I visited the city one month before the tragic event. The apartment building I moved in was for Columbia University post graduate students. My roommate was a Chinese student union president. He showed me his photo’s with some well known Chinese officials during their visits. He spent a lot time to host an event and invited Lang Lang - quite an interesting fellow. But I was totally not interested in his activities. To me, this guy was wasting his precious time and resources on non-sense stuff.

Anyway, I started my work the 2nd day I arrived at NYC. My friend was in the same team – actually the network design team had only 3 engineers including me. My first job was to draft a complete WAN diagram for the company’s global network. I was surprised to know that there was none existing! It was not hard after all. It took me a day or so to create one.

The manager was from India. He used to be an engineer himself, maybe even a good one. But definitely he was not the right type as a manager. He had an engineering mind, assuming he was still good at it while in fact, his knowledge was quite obsolete. He micro-managed too much in his senior staffs’ daily job. I was so used to doing my own things and nobody came and bothering me. I was so used to turn on TV and join a conference call from my couch. Here at NYC, none of that was possible. I had to sit in front of a computer all day!

The good thing was that my friend and I worked on almost everything together. At least we can cover each other. The work itself was easy. The 2nd job was to create a VoIP strategy for the company. The 3rd job was to create an IP scheme for that VoIP strategy. None took me long. But the review process dragged on and on.

As senior technical staff, we were not asked to carry pagers, most of the time. There was a 10+ people network operation team. But each month, we had one night to carry the pager. I remember my first night when I got this thing, I was kind of panic - what if something happened and I did not know what to do? $$$ were involved here. Well, that something indeed happened. Around 1:00 a.m. the pager went off. ESCALATION! One critical service at Japan was off line. I logged onto the company network, joint the conference call. A bunch of people were already in the call. Within 15 seconds after I logged on, I asked if there was new device on the network, and why it had the same IP range as the server subnet in Japan. It turned out that one guy from the operation team was adding some new switches and mistakenly used a wrong IP range and advertising it. The next morning, my managed asked me to go buy a coffee on the street together. One guy passed us by and telling my manager he got a good guy in his team.

OK, that was my first few weeks. One thing to mention, the IT department’s building was cross the street from Lehman Brothers’ building. The friend who helped me finding the apartment worked there. At that time, it was unimaginable to know Lehman Brothers would collapse in just a few years.更多精彩文章及讨论,请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
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