Looking at my e-mail, I see my afternoon will be solid meetings, all of them in the "people around a table at the far end of the building from actual stuff" mold.
This is not what you might call one of my strengths. Or interests. Or can-stay-awake-durings. We're short-handed; most of last week and all but a couple of hours of this week, my efforts have been purely reactive, "CRISIS --> TROUBLESHOOT --> SOLVE." In my line of work when you are doing mostly that, it means you've messed up on maintenance, operator training, infrastructure* and/or staffing† and if you don't fix those fundamental issues, it will only get worse.
Pretty sure I'd have to set up my own little skunkworkings to make a stab at fixing that -- and I'd go broke in the process, too.
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* Do not even get me started about the undocumented spatchcock ad-hockery of our LANs, a poorly-controlled mess with responsibility divided between two departments that share a deep aversion to removing no-longer-needed connections. It gets worse from there.
† Not enough people, wrong or insufficient skill sets, poor management/worker balance, etc. A certain amount of this is unavoidable: normal play in the working parts of the machine, without which it could not move. Too much, though, spells doom.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
6 comments:
'Mr Raxxaffian, we're concerned about your lack of productivity!'
'In order to insure an increase, we'll have hourly meetings on your progress.'
'If that doesn't work out, then we'll just have to have more meetings to analyze your use of company time.'
Bobbi, I feel for ya'.
Raz
Sorry about that! Sorta the same around here I'm afraid as well.
We had two conflicting mottoes at my first job: "Meetings are our most important product" fighting with "A Meeting is no substitute for Progress"...
You can't win, but being in the meetings you can at least hear about the new brain-storm from the wrong end of the building earlier.
I know you said the meeting worked out better than hoped... one way to get the LAN/infrastructure stuff straightened out is get the "powers that be" to have a "security test" from a real PenTest organization.
Can't offer any wisdom on the operational end of things, except to say that someone (not you by choice) should be tracking mean-time-to-failure and mean-time-to-repair. Especially if you are fixing the same things over and over again.
It is the season. We have ISO auditors upon us. . There is the matter of work instructions for legacy products. And, since moving to the new building, all the targets are at completely different distances. I think you can take it from there.
"Pretty sure I'd have to set up my own little skunkworkings to make a stab at fixing that -- and I'd go broke in the process, too."
I was wondering when that particular lightbulb over your head would illuminate.
But as you noted, it ain't exactly inexpensive.
Considering the trend to smaller stations contracting out broadcast engineering, it seems to me that would be right up your alley.
I originally found your blog from a comment you made on Paul Thurst's 'Engineering Radio' blog on antenna base current measurement.
That's what he did (contract broadcast engineering) when the company he worked for contracted out those services.
Consider asking his advice if you go that route...
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