Many years back, I thought I was a Geek and headed for faster and better things in my electronic life. I sat in a Staff meeting for my boss when he was out of town and the Chief of Staff cam into the meeting. He asked us who owned a computer and I was the only person that raised my hand. I had purchased an Apple 2C for our son and I was basically a user. That meant that I could do word processing, had a rough idea of spreadsheets and I was many levels into a game called Load Runner.
The chief knew that I was about to get promoted to GS11 and he told me that I was now the new GS-11 Director of Information Management for the Kansas Army National Guard. What did that entail? He had no clue but he told me that I needed to pack my bags and be ready to attend a meeting that week in Washington, D.C. I loved to travel on the Government's dime so I did what I was told and showed up at the meeting.
From the first minute of the meeting, it was clear that most of the people there had been working in the Computer Processing Center in each state. I was so far behind them that I had to sit and study a thesaurus to understand most of what they said. The new DOIM from Arkansas, Carol Johnson took pity on me and spent a lot of time helping me just keep up. I was really good at taking notes but that didn't help if I didn't understand the enormity of the job. Basically, what we learned was that in a month, we would attend a class that showed us how to write the Automation Architecture for each State. I was to go back home and have the Chief of Staff pick 4 or 5 other people to assist in the process. That was done.
We went to Camp Ripley Minnesota for a week long class and our team learned what we needed to do. Somewhere in the bowels of the documents stored for prosperity is the original copy of the automation Architecture we wrote. It was a current diagram of the locations of our units, the State Staff and how we needed to link it all together. Somehow we acquired a part of another State's plan and it helped us quantify the amount of computer processing files we needed to automate. It was a colossal amount of work and I don't have a clue if it ever really did anything for Kansas. I think the plans were somehow averaged and that helped some contractor in Washington write a giant plan and build a budget.
From there, I stumbled on for about a year in the computer business until a job in Operations and Plans opened up and I moved back into my comfort zone. I could write plans until the cows came home and loved solving problems in a language I knew. "Geek Dom" was not for me and I just simply have remained a power user. Now enter today's modern mysteries and I am reduced to the kind of guy that relies on others to solve the computer problems.
Do you remember that I said that the Apple 2C was for our son? The good news is that once that seed was planted, he stayed in touch with the business and even worked on the Geek Squad at Best Buy for a while. He keeps me up and running.
I guess where I am heading with this is that I am going to raise the flag of "Help" soon and see if I can get Dave to sow me how this monster I have to type on works. I want to know what the hell I have all this terra bites of information for and why things are going out to the cloud? What the hell is a cloud and will it one day bite me on the butt and make me pay for the storage?
MUD aka working faster than my brain can process.
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