I haven’t mentioned it here, but I’ve been on the job hunt a few months after I got my job with Target. The truth is, I really hate working in call centers. There’s no challenge for me and I get bored quickly. Of course there’s always people I find interesting and fun to work with, but being that we’re on the phone all the time, it seems like we never really get a chance to know each other. Our conversations take place between phone calls and are always cut short by the beeps of our phone. It’s sad because I would really like to get to know some of these people.

Well a couple weeks back my dear mother brought to my attention an opening for a Network Technician at the Minnetonka school district. I didn’t take much notice at first, but when I finally got a chance to check out the job description, it looked like I’d found something I was both qualified for and really had a shot at. It also pays much better than my previous job; $18-20/hr. So I put together my best resume, cover letter, and application and mailed it off. Dissapointingly, I recieved an email a few days later saying they’d already began final interviews. With that I figured I’d just have to forget about it. On with my mundane world at Target. Much to my surprise on Monday morning I recieved a phone call from the school. They were still looking for one more tech. I set up a time for a technology test with them.

From what I’d learned on the phone, the test was 90 min long. I couldn’t possibly imagine what was going to take me 90 min. Being that I know my way around computers better than anything else in the world I figured I’d whiz through it in like half an hour. No offense to any who doesn’t know computers, but I always seem to get either way underestimated when it comes to my skils. Either that or I’m some kind of technology guru (when in fact I don’t know all that much). Part of me was saying there was nothing they could throw at me that I couldn’t handle. The other part was fearing the worst.

I woke up at the ass crack of dawn on Thursday and made it to the school a good 45 min early. I didn’t know how bad traffic would be on I494, but it turned out to be not bad at all. So I ended up sitting in my car in the rain for awhile, but it was a good chance to just collect my thoughts and listen to some music.

I strolled in right on time and met Robyn, the HR lady. She took me to a small conference room with a laptop set up. After explaining that the test was just a Word file in which I was supposed to answer all the questions, my mind was a bit more at ease. I managed to rip through the first 14 questions without much trouble. I made sure to give concise yet complete answers. The final question turned out to be a doozy. It basically laid out a scenario where there were 7 tasks to accomplish and I had to give a summary of how I’d handle the issues. What it boiled down to was prioritizing. I took the basic premise that problems affecting the largest groups of people should be handled first. The only thing that might take precedence would be something I knew I could handle quickly or work around and come back to. I’ll try to remember the problem.

You are to arrive at the middle school by 7:30AM and here is your list of tasks:

  1. A single teacher is getting an error writing to the disk when using a math program (permissions problem)
  2. The school lunch program which runs over a wireless connection is having problems contacting the central server
  3. One person is having Microsoft Word crash
  4. A switch is erroring and the Network admin wants you to look at the error lights on the switch and call them back to her
  5. Microsoft Outlook is crashing when opening jpeg or gif attachments on a single computer
  6. An admin’s report is printing in gibberish and she needs it to present to a group of parents at a 10AM meeting

You get on site and are immediately stopped by the media paraprofessional. She tells you there is a class in the computer lab and they are having problems with a Flash site.

I solved the problem like this. The switch I called in first. I figured the network admin could get the information she needed and work on it from there without my assistance. While this is only affecting one person at this time, if the switch goes down, it could potentionally affect many more.

Second, I said I would maybe stop by the admin’s office and try to print their report to a different printer. Chances are this would at least temporarily solve their problem. I would also possibly try moving the document to another computer and printing it to yet another printer. If neither of those worked, I’d have to put the problem on the back burner until I could come back to it.

Simiarly, I thought of stopping by the computer lab since the class in the lab would only be there a short time. The problem might be the site itself and unfixable. Or it could be a small problem with how the students are accessing it. If I wasn’t able to fix it right away, this too would have to be shelved until I could come back to it. With Flash sites usually it’s usually a matter of installing or updating the program to get it working. This is a pretty simple process and provided the students had the rights to do it, I could maybe show them the fix and get them up and running

I also made sure to note that I realized these problems may be worth skipping since they had the potential to be dragged into larger programs. I’ve been in these situations before and once you step into a room everyone seems to want to take care of their little problems first. It’s very easy to get wrapped up with a bunch of little jobs in no time at all. Before you know it, the day is over and you’ve accomplished less than half of what you set out to do.

Moving on… I decided the cafeteria would be next on my list. It would probably take the most time to fix since wireless networking was involved. Wireless can be pretty tempermental. Sometimes it just doesn’t work (usually an interference issue) and you have to do a lot of moving antennas and what not. I also figured I might have a shot a fixing the issue before lunch which would be ideal. If all else failed, I might think abour running a long ethernet cable if it was an option.

The three remaining problems I thought were fairly equal. Each of them was a single person being affected and all of them had the potential to go as far as reinstalling software (or worse, the operating system). For these I laid out basic troublshooting steps. Start from the cause of the problem and work your way up. Troubleshoot the problem file, then the program, then the operating sytem, and so on.

Well, they gave me a call back today and said I scored “very high” on the test. It really made me feel good. I’m totally stoked for my interview next Thursday and I can’t wait to show them how much I want the job. I am meeting with Robyn, the Technical Coordinator, and an assistant superintendant who oversees the IT department. I’m sure I’ll have no trouble with it. And if they can see half the enthusiasm I have toward this job and in the field as a whole, I think they’ll hire me.