Follow the "leader"

It's the end of day 4 of my 11 week internship here. So far I think it's been pretty alright. The last 3 days have improved after my first day's initial trauma with the car. The day's recording has been removed together with its bundle of worries and complaints. Decided not to let everyone worry or get pissed off and hope for the better, which actually it did get better. Then again, maybe I got it off my chest with my ranting to the unfortunate few mates that I met online.

Well, it did get better and yeah, so I think it was good not to have that post as a taint on this exciting adventure into texas as a paying intern. yippee!! so far, I have not had any other tramautizing experiences with the car. Yes.. very good.. I shall attempt to keep up my good work here and I feel that I'm starting to get intuned to life here and have more or less adjusted my expectations.

Among the 4 of us interns here, I've been assigned to the manager, and it does have its pros and cons. Pros cos I feel like I'm learning from the best, and he gives me the best answers around in the lab. Some of the others when hearing my questions, give me a variety of "eh.. I'm not involved in that area" or "I duno, I just do it, just in case" "I think it's not involved.. I don't know.. I might be wrong"... Con is.. pro people can't really get down to our level, and when he's explaining something, I think he sometimes skips a lot of the in betweens, cos he assumes that you already know what he's talking about. And I have this idea, what they will be less understanding if you don't get it first time round. Secondly, he's really busy. While, the rest of the engineers basically sit in the room all day, my guy is running around the labs, trying to get stuff fixed. I've been assigned to 2 mentors, one is bryan, the manager, and this other guy,mike. However, Mike is always busy too and I think he is also one of the more experienced guys in the team and is also always running around. Plus, maybe it's in his character that it's just not all that natural to have an intern to explain things to and remember.
It's really hard to get them to have a session with you. But when you do, they are very beneficial. If i happen to miss them and they go missing from the lab, then I have to start stoning. Sometimes when I see them come in looking all busy, I feel that I might bother them, so I give them time to settle what they are doing, and the moment I turn my head, they are gone. Again. Initially I was a bit afraid of bryan, cos he's the manager and rather intimidating, plus he runs around even more, so I tried to stick with mike, butmike never seems to remember me! or just acts like i'm not there cos he's busy with his jobs, unless I really go bug him. soo.. oh well... I'm still trying to find out what's best.

another less forgetful day

Li: Morning mike! So what are you going to do and what can I do today?

Mike: hey, we are doing some bashers today. but we have to wait for bert to do the service packs first. so we'll start at 10am ok?

Li: Yeah ok!

(so meanwhile I go look at service packs)

at 9.30am or something, my boss comes in... and I eavesdrop

bryan: mike, so have u conducted the basher?

mike: not yet, I'm waiting for bert to do the service packs cos I'm afraid the network will be affected

bryan: it's okay, there shouldn't be a problem. you can do it now

mike:yeah okand as they talk, they are walking towards the door, and I panick! Hey what about me? are u going now NOW? or just going toilet or something? weirdo if i stop him and he's going toilet or soemthing. and I'm just eavesdropping u know?and then... WHAM!

Mike is gone for the entire day. Wow... HE FORGOT ME!!

SO why is it that I remember these little things. Cos yeah.. if you are stuck in the room, with nothing to do, feeling a little awkward, you kind of start playing back the scenes over and over again to ask yourself how did you get stuck in such a situation in the first place.

Luckily, bryan took me in and showed me some connections stuff in the lab later on that day, and I decided to hook onto him instead.

so next day, which is today, I don't know if it's an improvement or not.. And what happened today is
Boss is in the big server room (makes singapore's one look like toy) with the zillions of cables connections to dozens of hubs and watever ports and suspects there is some cable linking two things together when it shouldn't and is screwing up the system. And what do i do? I follow him EVERYWHERE. He runs around checking cables, plugging them in, walking back to the comp to check the response, goes to another and plugs it out and checks the response, and I just keep following right behind him. What to do? sit and act pretty while ur boss is working like a mad man? hmm.. and when he goes plug some cable, he turns a few corners and he's out of my vision. What happens if he ditches me in the server room!? ok.. which he didn't. yeah..
then later on, there was this other technican following him around too, and suddenly

he asks: HEY! are you following me!? (In a friendly, act suspicious way)

me: no... I'm following HIM!

he: oooh.. I'm following him too!

and he is damn funny, and he's tim and helped answer some questions of mine which i didn't manage to ask bryan. And made me feel all better about the following thing. He was like.. yeah.. don't worry, bryan doesn't know what he's doing either. we just follow him around. Or when bryan checks something out and rushes off and tim has to tidy up the cables. tim says: you see.. the managers check out the stuff, we technicans got to follow them and have to put the cables back.
basically, he made me feel less of an alien, following bryan around like dat.

Yeah.. and well.. i didn't learn that much technical stuff today, but just a lot of practical stuff. Cos later on that day, Bert's patch didn't work on half the servers, and then they found out from california's side that it didn't work on their side too and that microsoft sent us a premature release! this guy thought another guy tested it already, and sent it to us, when he hadn't. Damn messed up lah!

so what happened is that this caused half our servers to cock up and there was no way of getting them started again. And so bad, bryan had to call IT support to restore the servers from the full backup done during the weekend plus the incremental backups for mon thru wed. liew! then the microsoft guy came over to apologise. Which I must mention! Microsoft is just next door! One door from our lab! Damn cool lah! sounds super nerdy. but it really is damn cool.

In singapore, we troubleshoot some problems for a few days, then finally arrange for meeting with microsoft and some folks come over to discuss the issues.
then vincent in belgium told jerry how cool it was that in their belgium side, they have a special system, which they enter any problems directly into the database system for microsoft. Then. here.. microsoft is our friends.. haha..any problem troubleshoot halfday, cannot be solved can just assume microsoft bug and ask microsoft to come and have a discussion. In fact, heard a few of the microsoft guys transferred over to alcatel lab instead. Yesterdae, one guy just transferred over and everyone was so excited. welcome him over to the light side. =)

Oh and they are very nice people. Today, my contacts lens poped out and I got on the floor to look for it. then I told everyone to stay on their seats cos I dont want it to get crushed. Then oscar went to get the flash light from his table and passed it to jeff who was sitting near where I dropped it started using the torch light to start scanning for it. Then some other guy went into another room to fetch another HUGE light and started scanning the floor. Then oscar, I think he's 50 plus le, got down on his fours and started searching for me.. WAhh!! cannot believe it.. very touched by their helpfulness and amazed also. usually, i expect people to just bend their knees and use their eyes to search and ask me is it here is it there? then in the end, this gal who was doing just exactly that reeann found it for me. Whew! But A lot of people had gotten involveed in finding it. really very nice people this bunch.. very re xin? whats that in english? =)

ok, it's damn late le, I gotta sleep. recordings another day... nights!

oh .. and I am li not liling, cos when I intro myself as liling, almost nobody remembers the ling part,
***: Hi! I'm *** what's your name?
me: hello! My name is Liling
***: Oh... nice to meet you Li..

It's amazing.. I don't mind seriously.. Just amused and amazed by how the second part of the name never fails to go missing.

Hmmm.. they got it wrong on the userid log in, they got it wrong at the car rental, they got it wrong on my name tag, they got it wrong on my company info. and I already corrected all of them... so yeah... LI it is