Letter of Notification

2006-01-02T20:59:00.000-08:00

Today, even though it was a holiday, I sent out my official letter of resignation. I did this because I wanted to give two weeks notice and I want to be able to start my new position on Jan 16th. So since I gave my notice today that would officially give me two weeks.

I'm real nervous about going to work tomorrow. I can't imagine the fallout from this and I don't know how the management will react or what I will do about counter offers. I usually have a policy on counter offers; I don't take them because once I make up my mind that's it. And I don't want to work at a place where I might always be viewed as someone who might not quite be the team player.

Quitting My Job

2006-01-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

I have been working for the 3rd largest computer integrated in the world for one of the largest manufacturing conglomerates in Connecticut for over 5 years. I started out working on this account as a consultant and after 3/4 of a year the offered me a job and I took it. I started out racking servers at a data center in the East Hartford facility for a move that was under way, were the customer was moving most of its personnel and manufacturing from Palm Beach FL to East Hartford. The servers were being moved from Fl to CT and when that job waned out I got a job working for the Intel server transformation Team. You see the large integrator that I had been working for had the outsourcing contract at the division or business unit of this conglomerate that made Jet engines and then the integrator won the contract that outsourced all of the server, local area network, help desk, desktop support and all the IT work except for development for the parent company. So I was placed in the Intel, NT, and transformation team. We had to determine what servers could be consolidated, refreshed, updated or decommissioned on the new contract, it sounded pretty interesting. The only problem was there was no real direction. No one knew where to start and the integrator was spending large amounts of cash to jump start this initiative with no real results. Every time we started to do serious work it was halted due to lack of funds. We sat around all day talking about sports and surfing the web and trying to look busy. Then I received in about 2.5 Million worth of Compaq Proliant DL 380's and DL580's. I was supposed to set these up and either install them at the different business units or send them out to be racked and installed for the purpose of creating a management infrastructure of CA products that would 1. Keep an eye on the health of the servers and 2. Update computers with the latest packages. As soon as I started I was told to stop because the CA products, it was determined would be installed not on the Account standard Compaq products, but on Dell Power app servers. So I decided that I could use my inventory of Compaq servers to jump start the refresh imitative that I started to work on weeks before, but was stopped till now. I had a list of servers that were over 3 years old and needed to be refreshed, and this was changed to only refresh servers that were over 5 years old. I sent out e-mails to the NT support teams at the business locations and notified them that I had an inventory of small and medium Compaq servers and I made recommendations of servers that I believed should be refreshed and I made available my inventory and time and labor to get the refresh started. At one business unit, that built Helicopters, I helped out on an effort to replace the whole infrastructure of Banyan Vines servers with NT servers. At another business unit, that makes space suites and equipment, I installed a Citrix farm. At one business unit, which does research for the conglomerate, I refreshed some old. I spent my time getting to know the NT support staff and looking for a place to "land" when the transformation team was ended. I also helped setup a few racks in the Web Hosting data center. This place was at the time the mainframe data center but plans were under way to move the mainframe applications to mainframes in another data center and to make this facility the web hosting infrastructure for the whole conglomerate. When I came back from the Christmas New Years shutdown I was sent to the Web Hosting Data Center to help with installing servers and building the servers there for projects that were getting behind. I was to help out for a one month period. When that month was up I was told that I was no longer on the "Transformation Team" and that I now worked for this data center. I was offered a job at this data center. The Job was not on the NT team because they didn't have the open FTE available to absorb by time but on the "Production Operation" team, which consisted only of me. It was a way of getting an extra person on the NT team with out the NT team having to pay for that extra person. I did all the stuff the NT team did and even took my assignments from them. They even had me carry the NT on call pager for them. My boss the Manger of the data center and Manager for prod/ops for the whole account George was a real cool guy. He was retired from a large insurance company in the area named after the insurance city it self. He was the kind of guy that supported you even when you made mistakes. He decided that prod/ops were to take over the backups of all the servers in the data center so he hired Joe. Joe used to work at a data center in Bridgeport for a CT bank based in Bridgeport. Joe's background was with Solaris 5, 6, 7 and 8 and with Veritas Netbackup 3.X. Good smart guy. The NT team had been doing the backups for the servers on the "DMZ" and the UNIX Group had been doing the backups for the stuff on the regular "inside" network. Now those backup jobs were transferred to Joe. Joe had me take over the DMZ backups and he concentrated on the regular network backups because the regular networks were installed on Veritas Netbackup 3.x on Solaris 6 and the DMZ backups were on the same installed on NT 4. In time Joe's job and my job became backups and taking care of all the hardware in the data center. Joe was the expert with Solaris so he new all about the Solaris backup client and I became the expert with the NT and Win2k client. Joe also took over the job of administering the Hitachi San that we had because too many people from the NT and UNIX group were messing it up and after several San outages George told us to take it over. My job was fixing any messed up NT backups and fixing any NT hardware. I also did all the racking of all the Intel servers. Joe did the San administration, Solaris backups and Solaris racking and hardware maintenance. I stilled carried the NT pager but I stopped doing the OS builds on the NT servers. I learned enough Solaris to jumpstart Sun boxes and diagnose hardware issues and to backup Joe when he went out on vacation. Joe took a 3 week vacation and I had my trial by fire, by having to do the stuff that he had to do around the data center. It was scary to say the least but I prevailed and learned a lot. George quit and went to work for another insurance company. And Joe and I had to endure one inept manager after another. Joe and I replaced the Hitachi with EMC Carrions and then Joe quite the pro/ops department and went to the UNIX group. He took the Carrion administration with him. I ended up having to do my job and Joes Job. Now I could spend most or all of my time just concentrating on backups but I also had all the Hardware issues and NT on call tickets to do also. I also became the one who had to purchase all the racks for NT and UNIX and all the pieces that go with them. I maintained the bid's with electricians to wire the cabinets with electricity and network patching. I maintained most of the vendor relationships with the data center and I was the one who gets yelled at whenever anything in the data center goes wrong. I do the job of 4 or 5 people and I'm always in a bad mood, go figure. My boss hired a desktop support tech to help me out. I got him racking and stacking and doing break fixes while I concentrate on the rest of the stuff. A few months back my wife is logged into my yahoo account and she sees that there is a job posting for "Storage Management' consulting position at the Big insurance company in Hartford named after the insurance city. (Also George has gone back to this company as the manager in charge of disaster recovery) She submits my resume to this company. They call me and I submit an application for employment and I go to a job interview. I thought that the position was for backups but it was for storage management. I told them that I was out of the loop on the Carrion Management because Joe had been doing that work for quite some time now. They didn't care. They were looking for a good backup administrator who was willing to learn the San stuff. The lead tech knew me from a San class that I took a couple of years earlier and he liked me. The HR department at first told me that they thought that I wasn't qualified because of my less than stellar military career with the less than stellar military discharge. I had to provide them with all the details and a copy of my discharge papers. So I went away thinking that oh well, so much for that. George Calls me and tells me that he's pulling for me to join the insurance company. Then I get a call from the HR people that they will investigate the incident into my discharge and if it is what I said it was then it would be alright. The HR people call me and tell me that the insurance company will not be doing anything with the position till after the beginning of the year and this was at the end of November. I go about my job and figure whatever happens, happens and that the insurance company deal is a long shot. I work long and hard till the Christmas break and on the Christmas break the insurance company calls me with an offer. I tenitivly say yes and now I have to go back to work on Tuesday and tender my resignation to a boss that I less then love but to a place I have poured my heart and soul into for over the past 5 years. The upside is that I will be working for a good company that treats its employee’s great, probably one of the best employers in the country. The But and a big BUT is that now I have to start packing my stuff and severing my ties and I'm nervous about the whole thing.

PEBEAR's World

Letter of Notification

Quitting My Job