Chickenminnie’s Weblog

One of my colleagues gave me a newspaper clipping a few years ago which I have pinned up in my cubicle. It’s a photograph of a woman attempting to hold back a rather large group of military types; my guess is that seconds after the photo was taken she was trampled by this angry mob. He cut out the picture and gave it to me because he said it reminded him of what my job must be like.

The biggest battle on this job is, without a doubt, the whole issue of content filtering which is required by law for a school district. You can almost hear the screams about censorship from there, can’t you? I get angry emails daily from teachers who insist that I am hampering their freedom and inhibiting learning. The irony in all of this is that my only criteria for whether or not I “whitelist” a website is how much impact it will have on the network.

About 18 months ago I had to turn off the streaming audio and video category on our filter. We were plagued by phone calls from people whining about how slow the internet was, so I contacted the wide area guys at BOCES who provided me with a nifty little breakdown of where my bandwidth was going. I was astounded to see how much of the pipe was being used by “junk” traffic like streaming radio, so I made the decision to turn it off. My reasoning was that adding sites to an allow list is way easier than tracking down the offending user, and trying to explain the concept of finite bandwidth to a teacher is like nailing jello to a tree.

The internet slowdowns stopped, but I got a lot of hate mail from teachers who claim I destroyed their “teachable moments” (for those of you who do not work in education, a “teachable moment” is French for “I’m too lazy to do a lesson plan”). My rebuttal is that I am happy to add a site to the allow list…all they need to do is provide me with a URL. Most of them send along a link and I accommodate them by giving them same day service. Interestingly enough, the ones who scream the loudest don’t bother sending me anything.

Like most technology issues it is still a work in progress. We have kicked around the idea of using a packet shaper, but I hate throwing hardware at a people problem and at this point I have a sizable white list in place. Packet shapers tend to cause their own little set of issues, and lowering the priority of streaming is still going to dent people who are using it for instructional purposes…which is contrary to what I wanted to accomplish in the first place.

Many years ago when I was hired by BOCES I was told that some day I would need to take a Civil Service test for my position; I had already worked for another BOCES in a Civil Service capacity, so it came as no surprise to me. Years went past and my colleagues and I waited knowing that eventually we would be classified by the Civil Service gods; when the day finally came it was an experience none of us will forget.

Classifying people like us is tough because we do a little of everything. That, coupled with the fact that the folks who staff the Albany County Civil Service Department bring a new meaning to the term incompetent, and you have a recipe for some serious stress. Some of my colleagues have worked for BOCES for over twenty years, but rather than grandfathering them in, they had to take a test in order to keep their jobs. If someone off the street scored higher than they did, they would be out of a job!

There were a lot of other anxiety-producing rules and directives that went along with this classification process. The people reviewing the applications were apparently masochists; one of the programmers’ application for Civil Service status was denied because she had a degree in Mathematics, not Programming. It did not matter to them that she had been programming for us for seven years! Seniority for everyone was set at zero; we were able to keep our years in the retirement system, but as far as Civil Service was concerned our start date is the day we were given permanent status. And after reaching permanent status we had to be on probation for a year.

You would think our administration would be mighty concerned at the prospect of potentially losing a lot of employees, but instead we were greeted by the gallic shrug of management. Most of them are high enough on the food chain to be exempt from tests. Some people did actually get hired by their respective districts or took different positions to avoid taking the chance of losing their jobs.

I am happy to report that I finally reached permanent status as a Network Administrator, but it doesn’t end there. A few weeks ago I found out that my district was planning on posting my job at a higher rate, effectively giving me a raise. Nifty, huh? Except I can’t apply for my own job because the Senior Network Administrator exam I took and passed does not count!

Isn’t Civil Service great?

I work for Capital Region BOCES as a Network Administrator and it’s a pretty good gig. Four days per week (the BOCES maximum….yes, it’s weird) I am stationed at a progressive Suburban Council school in upstate New York. They have a sizable technology budget, an administration who realizes that technology can actually work for them, and a parent population who believes that SAT preparation begins at birth. On the fifth day I am a shared resource which means I can get sent just about anywhere. My managers typically respect the fact that I administer one of the largest and most complex districts in the area, so my fifth day is usually spent at the office catching up on the minutiae of the district…paperwork, research and documentation.

You can imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when my manager told me I would be doing a long term assignment at my old district, Watervliet City. Apparently the guy who replaced me (who makes a lot more money than I do) has done such a poor job of things that the district is in a technological crisis, and they asked that he be removed never to return again. Great.

I could not believe the mess I was greeted with when I arrived there. Backups had not been successfully run in months, there were stacks of trouble tickets, and the office was such a mess that I had to fill two trashcans of crap before I could find a place to set my laptop. The staff and faculty were desperate for tech help, and I felt like I had been dumped into a tank of piranhas. One teacher got down on his knees and begged me to come back; I was flattered but thought, “when hell freezes over”.

It made me sad to see what had happened to the nice little network I left behind two years ago, but it was sadder to think about the damage that has been done to the reputation of BOCES. The technicians who are placed in districts are ambassadors for the organization and blissfully free from a lot of home office micromanagement; the expectation is that they will work independently to address the technology needs of the district they serve. Hopefully this “rotten apple” experience will not change all that.