Government Employees vs. Contractors

[Tdarcos]

(I am moving the message from the prior item to comply with the "no deleting of text" rule.)

Some people think that just because people are government employees it makes them lazy. Contractors can be very diligent or very lax, too.

There are also differences in how some people do work. We were upgrading people in one government office from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. There were me, John, and another guy whose name I can't remember, I'll call him "Milo", who were contractor employees, and everyone else were Federal employees.

I was John's assistant, he did the "heavy lifting," where he'd bring their machines in from their office, copy their files onto a server, then assign them a new machine, give me the machine, and then restore their files on the machine after I'd finish.

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[Tdarcos]

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In a one month period we had to move 65 people from their old machine to their new one, about two people a day. They'd go to training on Windows 95 and when they got back, they'd have their new machine all configured with their passwords, their files, their network settings and everything else.

So anyway, there were two teams; John and I, and Milo and one other guy. By our doing this, it allowed the Federal employees in our department to continue regular help-desk and technical support work of answering questions and sometimes going to customers to fix their problems (more on that in a separate message).

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[Tdarcos]

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My job was to install all the software that they needed, assign their default printer, set their mailbox to point to their server, and so on. I created a checklist for the process. In which I would have a list of everything they needed to be done to their machine, and as I set up an item I'd check it off.

Once all the items on the page are done, you are. You can't make a mistake and you can't miss anything. Yeah, I already know what to do - I wrote the checklist - but using one means it's much simpler and makes it impossible to forget anything.

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[Tdarcos]

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Nobody told me to do it that way, but there were two things; if someone else ever had to do the job they might not know how, and, of course, I can make mistakes, so by sticking to the list, I can't.

So, anyway, the two teams got all 65 machines delivered on time. John and I configured 60 of them. Every single one went out to the customers perfectly; we got one (1) machine returned because the customer screwed something up, after we sent it to them in perfect condition.

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[Tdarcos]

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Milo and the other guy, in the same period of time, configured 5 machines, and every single one of them came back with something wrong with them before they were sent to the customers.

I'm really proud of that, I set up 60 consecutive machines and didn't have one single mistake; the other guy couldn't even ship 5 to the customers without something wrong with every one of them, and we both had the same amount of time.

(Continued in Part 6)

[Tdarcos]

(Continued from Part 5)

This was on top of the fact I was still doing incoming help desk telephone calls along with everyone else, since installing the software was, then, like now, short bursts of effort where you respond to a question from the installation or swap out a disk for the next piece of the install, and the rest of the time you're just waiting for the software to set up whatever it has to do.

So, just because you have non-government employees doing a job does not mean the job is going to be done competently, since Milo and the other guy were also contractor employees.

(This constitutes the entire text of the prior message; nothing was removed.)

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[Ice Cream Jonsey]

This site is crazy and senseless, and I love every second of it. Tdarcos, never change, you glorious bastard.