Training the Boss

Well, I got a new boss yesterday. We had been interviewing for new people to help restaff the HelpDesk here since we've lost quite a few over the last year and hadn't been replacing anyone. The job isn't God Awful but anyone that's ever worked in Customer Service of any kind knows how it can suck dealing with end users especially if you have to do it over the phone. Luckily though in our business we do more System Administration than anything and we have remote access to our customers via modem or VPN. I work in the draining mostly male world of SCADA, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. Our customers our utilities like your local power, gas or water company and they use our hardware and software to monitor their systems to make sure you have power, water and stuff like that. That's how I get to travel to exotic places like Lamar, Co or Madisonville, KY but I definitely can't complain because it's also allowed me to go to San Francisco (hi Chelli) , the Dominican Republic and Barbados.

Anyway, the department was all but decimated over the last year or so and those of us left were catching fire like a tree in the San Diego woods. Then our old boss left and it really sucked because we'd started together and were real good friends too. He was a bit of a puppet boss unfortunately because they didn't give him enough power to do things that would really have made the department better or easier to deal with. They mentioned that they would post his position after he left but we all pretty much said, they could forget about any interest from one of us. Sooooooo...at first they said they weren't going to fill the position and instead would have our boss' boss who is also a great guy and someone I worked with at my last job just assume direct responsibility for our group as well. It was ok except he's really a marketing guy and everyone including he and our contracts administrator would come to me for the real answers to how we do things around here. So I knew about a few of the people we interviewed cause I interviewed several of them.

Friday we had a department lunch and they announced that we had hired two people and they were both starting monday. One would be working in the pit with the rest of us and the other would be our new Technical Lead. I said in other words our boss, I dont know why our boss's boss was reluctant to say it himself. So they both started yesterday and it was actually the first time that I met my new boss as I was teaching when they interviewed him. Walking him in and showing him his office and where everything was, I realized just how much things change since when you first start out all bright eyed and bushy tailed out of college. I would have been nervous as heck talking to my boss for the first time back then. Yesterday it was , here let me show you to your office and tell you what you're gonna be responsible for. I set up a UNIX machine for him and gave him and the other new guy some basic training on our software and how everything works around here.

So that's how I spent my day yesterday. Showing my boss how to do his job and it's just the beginning because while he has several years of experience in the Industry he doesn't know our system at all and the toughest part for him, he doesn't know UNIX at all and that's our primary platform. Normally people would probably expect me to be upset about having to train my boss but really the job isn't worth the additional stress and headaches.