This is Part III in a series of descriptions of my former jobs. The first two can be found here and here.
One day after a college computer science class (assembly language and C programming), the instructor called me over and asked me if I’d be interested in a programming job. I said I was, and she gave me the name and phone number of the supervisor of the office that was looking for a student to hire. The supervisor had made friendships among some of the Computer Science department staff, and asked them to help her pick out smart students for programming job openings. It must have been the shirt I was wearing or something, because I wasn’t doing that well in the class.
I went to an interview at the office on campus. I wasn’t very good at interviewing, having only done a few for internship positions the previous year. After a few weeks they called me back and asked me if I’d like to work there. I had a feeling I wasn’t their first choice since it took them so long to get back to me, but I didn’t argue. I knew having some programming experience would help me when I was interviewing for real jobs someday.
The Physical Plant building is at the southwest corner of MSU’s main campus. At the time I got the job, I was living on campus in McDonel Hall, but eventually I moved off campus, several blocks from the northwest corner of campus, which put me decently farther away from work. But who cares? I had a bike and I was young, and I walked or rode my bike everywhere. It was no big deal. MSU’s campus is so expansive, it’s not news when you have a long way to go to get somewhere.
The Physical Plant division is responsible for several disjoint functions of the university. Here is their website: http://www.pp.msu.edu/index.htm The most prominent arm is the power plant, which was always what people thought of when I told them I worked at the Physical Plant. The power plant is a coal-fired electrical plant that provides electricity and heat to the campus. We took a tour and saw the huge turbines and the area where the coal was brought in from the train cars. The train tracks that cross Harrison near Trowbridge, and the tracks that cross Hagadorn just south of the dorms, are the tracks the coal was brought in on. [We could tell when there was a delivery of coal to the plant because we could feel the earth vibrate. When coal is delivered through rail, there is always extra coal that sticks to the bottom of the coal cars. The plant is equipped with big mechanical arms that shakes the cars and dislodge the remaining coal.]
The Physical Plant division also covers the university’s motor pool (cars for employees to borrow for university business), the key-making and duplicating department (for dorms and all the buildings), the engineering group (surveying, repairing sidewalks, planning building additions, etc.), a building maintenance group, a chemistry-based group (which was working on asbestos abatement when I was there), the MSU switchboard, and probably some other groups that I’m forgetting. I’m sure the Dungeons and Dragons crowd at MSU would have envied my access to the campus map of the steam tunnels stored in the engineering offices.
Our office’s job was to give these business units computer support. We wrote software for them, hooked their computers to our network, changed ribbons and toner cartridges in printers, and anything else they needed. The MSU switchboard had its own mini version of the mainframe we used, in case ours went down. We wrote the program they used to look up phone numbers, and we occasionally went over there to do maintenance and upgrades to that computer. [The operators were fun to listen to. They had a lot of phone numbers memorized, and would more times than not rattle them off immediately to the caller without having to look them up. By the way, the phone number for information at MSU is 353-1855, 1855 being the year the college was founded.]
We ran backups every weeknight, and stored them in fireproof vaults in another area of the building. There was a set schedule for how long backups were kept, and some backups were more important than others. Monday-Thursday backups were only of changes made since the previous Friday, and Friday backups contained everything in the system. Some Friday backups were kept for several months as a security measure, and I think the normal weekday backups were only kept for a few weeks. We even sent some backups offsite to some other building as an additional security measure.
We had big reels of tape that we used to back up the system. The backup program would tell us when to put the next reel onto the drive, and when we done we’d pack them up and carry them to the vault. Friday backups took two hours, and the daily backups took maybe 30-40 minutes. I liked doing the Friday backups because classes were done, and I could get an extra 2 hours of pay without having to worry about having an exam the next day. We were allowed to kick people off the computer who were still logged in after 5:00 pm, but we always called them first as a courtesy. I got chewed out a few times by unhappy people who had left their computers at the wrong time and had been disconnected. When we disconnected them, they were unable to use their computer at all – this was before everyone had a PC on their desk with a hard drive. Their hard drive was sitting in our room, and we controlled their access to it.
The mainframe we used was an HP3000. I couldn’t find a picture of it online, but it is a line of mainframe that’s been around for a long time. It was in a room about 15’x20’ that was air conditioned to offset the computer’s heat. Next to it were two large boxes, about 2’ square and 2’ high. Those were the disk drives. If I recall correctly, together they stored 2 gigabytes. Part of the floor was a series of 1’ square carpeted wood and rubber blocks, and those blocks could be removed to reveal a trench in which we ran cables to and from computers hooked up to the computer. I don’t think the whole floor was like that, just part of it. The trench led to a series of conduits that ran the length of the building and went to the other offices, and outside the building to the other buildings in the division.
[Here is a picture on BoingBoing.net of a data center that has a floor like the one we had – note the comment below the picture by a gentleman whose name is eerily similar to mine.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/21/web-zen-geeknerd-zen.html
We did not have a plunger to lift our floor tiles, we had a tool with spikes and handles that looked like a medieval torture device. You put the spikes at the top of the tile, pressed down, and operated a handle, which caused the spikes to dig into the carpeted rubber top of the tile. When the spikes were locked in, you lifted the whole thing up and out.]
Because it’s important to keep the temperature and humidity under control in a data center, there was a sensor installed that monitored the conditions in the room. If the temperature was too high, the unit would dial a phone number that was programmed into it, and when someone answered it would say “The temperature is 79 degrees. The humidity is 45%. The time is 11:33 pm.“ or whatever the conditions where. It was also possible to call this unit from an outside line, and it would repeat that information to you. Occasionally, someone would dial a wrong number, and the unit would ring, and we’d hear the unit telling the befuddled caller what the temperature was. More often than not, the unit would ring again a minute later, and give the message again – a lot of people who accidentally called it would call it again.
We had an open office setup with several student programmers. I think the number of students ranged from three to five when I was there. We were part of a larger office (Room 1) that housed some payroll people, a university/union go-between, a phone billing supervisor, and a few others. There were other students who worked in our outer office that we made friends with. Universities are terrific places to get a job as a student – there is so much to be done, and universities always have so much money. I was representing my company at a job fair a few months ago at MSU, and I walked by one of the engineering department offices. At the reception desk was a student, quietly doing homework, waiting for a phone to ring, or something else to do. How can you beat a job like that when you’re a student?
People in our group got along well with each other. We went out to lunch once or twice a week, and always had a good time. I remember going to Ponderosa quite a few times, and the hungry students having a contest to see who could each the most chicken wings at the $3.99 buffet. This is why Americans are fat – the Ponderosa buffet.
This was my first introduction to office politics and the different kinds of people who have to find a way to work together. There was a guy who had more than 1000 hours of vacation time saved up, and a woman who took every minute of her vacation and sick time as soon as it was available. There were people who we knew to steer clear of, and who looked down on the students, and there were others who welcomed the students and appreciated their help. I think a lot of the people we helped, especially with things like changing toner cartridges, liked the fact that there were students doing this work – I think some capable people didn’t bother with trying to change them, they just figured a student should do it.
We had a phone number that rang where the students sat, and we took turns answering the phone and helping people. We also had a schedule that we followed for some printers and other maintenance items.
The laughable tech support moments were inevitable. The one that sticks out in my mind was the woman’s keyboard that stopped working. She called the support line, and we went up with a replacement to give her. We asked if anything had happened to it, and she said no. When my supervisor picked up the keyboard, Coke spilled out of it and onto the floor and his shoes. Then a miracle occurred, and the woman’s memory of a Coke-related incident was restored.
Another time, a user reported a problem with that era’s version of a network router (a machine that allows multiple computers to share a single network connection). The routers in those days were much more expensive than they are today, and were the size of a modern-day PC. The office that reported the problem was very nicely decorated with pictures and plants. Unfortunately, one of the plants had been overwatered and had spilled water out of its pot. More unfortunately, it was sitting on top of the router, which had a layer of water inside its case. If I recall correctly, the router cost about $1000 to replace.
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