One year ago today, my other half at OldJob died suddenly in her sleep of congestive heart failure. She was in her mid forties with two children, aged 15 and 6. She was my other half in the sysadmin job, in that she handled the user environment. That's password resets, standardizing user-object field contents, managing name changes, moving objects between containers, some GroupWise foo, organizing the helpdesk so they did tape-changes, and keeping track of printer additions. Among other things.
I took care of "server stuff", such as login-scripts, patch-levels, and most aggrivatingly, tape backup. We worked very closely on server migrations as that is a major task, and one we got really good at over the years. We had it down to a science. And we both were peeved when the word came down from on high that the user environment would be migrated to Microsoft (no word from OldJob on if there is any progress on that). Our setup was unique at OldJob since we managed by a factor of four the largest NetWare environment than the next largest group of users, the two of us were kept quite busy.
Oddly, it was a year ago on the 3rd that I submitted my application to this job. I gave serious thought to calling WWU and telling them nevermind since we needed to deal with this sudden removal of a 27 year veteran who had been with Information Services since the seventies. As burocracies turn, by the time I DID leave OldJob her old job-functions had been fully subsumed into other functions.
As always, time does blur things. We worked really well together, and she did a very good job of insulating me from the more mundane day-to-day tasks of administering an environment with anywhere between 300-600 users (depends on how you counted noses, and who did the counting). We had that well oiled team thing down good, something that was very noticably skipping in her absence.
She was one of those people who archived every e-mail she sent. At one point her archive at 1.6gb was larger than the whole IS post-office (she was my #1 disk-space user on our server, no surprises there). This keep-it habit held to her paper files, as she did keep every set of minutes she wrote and received. And knew how to find things in there too. She WAS our organizational memory, and a close second was our boss who had been with OldJob for only slightly less time than this gal.
The day after, the 7th, I did a bit of forensics on her work machine looking for passwords and a will. It seemed she had been updating it, and the family wasn't finding it anywhere obvious. I didn't find the will, but I did find a palm-db file with passwords to certain financial sites. THOSE did prove useful.
Penny Kohler was the second funeral at OldJob. But it was the most personally impactful.
I took care of "server stuff", such as login-scripts, patch-levels, and most aggrivatingly, tape backup. We worked very closely on server migrations as that is a major task, and one we got really good at over the years. We had it down to a science. And we both were peeved when the word came down from on high that the user environment would be migrated to Microsoft (no word from OldJob on if there is any progress on that). Our setup was unique at OldJob since we managed by a factor of four the largest NetWare environment than the next largest group of users, the two of us were kept quite busy.
Oddly, it was a year ago on the 3rd that I submitted my application to this job. I gave serious thought to calling WWU and telling them nevermind since we needed to deal with this sudden removal of a 27 year veteran who had been with Information Services since the seventies. As burocracies turn, by the time I DID leave OldJob her old job-functions had been fully subsumed into other functions.
As always, time does blur things. We worked really well together, and she did a very good job of insulating me from the more mundane day-to-day tasks of administering an environment with anywhere between 300-600 users (depends on how you counted noses, and who did the counting). We had that well oiled team thing down good, something that was very noticably skipping in her absence.
She was one of those people who archived every e-mail she sent. At one point her archive at 1.6gb was larger than the whole IS post-office (she was my #1 disk-space user on our server, no surprises there). This keep-it habit held to her paper files, as she did keep every set of minutes she wrote and received. And knew how to find things in there too. She WAS our organizational memory, and a close second was our boss who had been with OldJob for only slightly less time than this gal.
The day after, the 7th, I did a bit of forensics on her work machine looking for passwords and a will. It seemed she had been updating it, and the family wasn't finding it anywhere obvious. I didn't find the will, but I did find a palm-db file with passwords to certain financial sites. THOSE did prove useful.
Penny Kohler was the second funeral at OldJob. But it was the most personally impactful.