A Little Bit About Work

“William! Go see the Boss!”

Since I don’t yet have a phone extension the MIS director has to field all my calls. I’d been working all day on configuring a terabyte of net storage, getting ssh to run on a Fedora Core PBX server, negotiating a price on some payroll software, and trying to finagle a few grand from accounts to get a purchase order to a reseller so we could schedule upgrade the accounting and inventory program we use. I was so entrenched in linux docs I didn’t hear him.

“William. Take you comp to the boss!”

It seems everyone very calls everyone by their last name. I’ve even heard people introduce themselves as their last name. It seems East Africa is just like Eastern PA, in that the last letter of my name is always strangely silent. They also call computers ‘comps,’ which I like and am goign to bring into American vernacular.

I had just sat down to a heaping plate of rice, red beans, and cabbage that needed salt and tabasco and I’ve got to be at the boss’ beck and call. There’s one other mac user at Base Camp (thank you Mols), who I’ve been trying to help out since her data was migrated to another user. She books safari tours, and uses her 17″ PowerBook for iLife multimedia capabilities. Somehow after the user swap she can’t access her sent mail. Boggles my frickin mind.

Since the Boss took all the pictures of wildlife, jungle, and serengeti sunsets, I figured I’d be tasked on solving the problem ASAP.

I jumped over some canvas being cut for some part of a tent, hopped across a ditch being dug for pipes running to the new tent factory, and made my way to the exec tents. They look just like the other tents but they house the big wigs.

I wiped my feet on the doormat to the tent (which still strikes me as a funny thing to do) and sat down at the desk.

“Hey! How you doin?”

My boss is great guy. He’s easy going, but intelligent and driven. I want to work hard just so I don’t disapoint him.

“not too bad, just getting over some road blocks with the back up server,” I lied. I hadn’t been able to assign it an IP for the past 3 hours. “What can I do for you?”

“Can I see your MacBook?” he asked.

“Of course,” I replied slightly puzzled, but confident, as I had quit Safari, Firefox, and Quinn before I trekked over. You see, every day is a battle with ADD. It’s not a condition. It’s a disease.
“It’s smaller than the old iBooks, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I responded, impressed with his familiarity. “It’s got the same chipset as the new Pro model, it just integrated graphics, rather than a dedicated processor so its not much of a gaming machine.”

“Hmm. Don’t the white ones have some discoloration problems?”

Hang on a sec. The reps at Fashion Show in Vegas didn’t know about that one. The guy at the genius bar did, but he was a genius and all. It was a fairly limited problem, with the first production models. I told him instead, “my girlfriend has one. She hasn’t had any problems with it. You sure know a bit about Apple….”

“I’ve used them since high school,” he said. “I wanted to check yours out before I asked [the CEO who’s in NY right now] to bring me one over from the States. The G4 over in Safaris used to be mine.”

At this point, of course, I had to refrain from nerdifying myself any further by explaining how to find Universal Binaries, how to three OSes at once, how intel just released Merom, the mobile version of the Conroe line today so he might want to wait a week or two if he can, or how I desperately needed more tape for my glasses. So I said, “cool. Lemme know if you need any help setting it up when it arrives.”

It’s nice working with a firm that respects quality.

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