April 09, 2004
Fridanother Five
It's Friday so here's another five.
1. What do you do for a living?
Data collection and analysis for the optimization of a cellular network.
2. What do you like most about your job?
Drive testing, where I'm out on my own. The test equipment does most of the work and I'm just cruising. Sometimes I drive a predetermined route, and sometimes I drive around a problem area paying a bit of attention to what the computer is reporting. Yesterday I drove several hundred highway miles, listening first to Condi Rice and then to rockabilly CDs, with less than half an hour of overt work involved, to determine where our customers would have roaming access on a new partner's network.
3. What do you like least about your job?
Trying to fix a trouble spot by tweaking parameters because corporate doesn't consider the Milwaukee market worth the investment of adding new cell sites.
4. When you have a bad day at work it's usually because _____...
I'm in the office processing customer service tickets and most of them are stupid. I'm getting one almost every day about lack of coverage in another state roaming off our network, and most of the rest don't have enough to analyze (and usually look like a bogus attempt to get out of a contract).
5. What other career(s) are you interested in?
Something else equally geeky. I stumbled into this line of work and this is my third contract doing it. Before that I was doing support and configuation of industrial control hardware. I interviewed a couple of years ago for a position doing onsite maintenance of point of purchase computers in stores and restaurants and thought that would be fun.
There were things I enjoyed about manufacturing metal work, but I'd rather do hobby gunsmithing or modelbuilding than go back into that as a career.
Posted by triticale at April 9, 2004 09:49 PM