Ever Wondered What My Day Job Is?

I'm sorry if my frequent talk about taking my part-time biz full-time makes it look like I have a terrible day job. 

image: liveyourlegend.net 

Here's the truth.
I work as the Service Delivery Lead and Switch Engineer for a Telecoms company. According to NCC, we are the biggest landline telephone service provider in Nigeria. And I work right in the core of our telephony section. 

As the Service Delivery guy I get to interface between the project managers and the marketing team. I manage the company's CRM. Automated a lot of stuff. Made a lot of trackers and progress dashboards. I have to know the progress status of every project from the day it was approved till the day it was completed. I have to also archive all vital documents relating to each project. But the most interesting part is arbitrating between the marketing team and the technical team. It makes me feel very important.

Then as the Switch guy, it's like playing the role of God. Just the same way we see God as the last resort, we Switch guys get that privileged status too. I work on an exchange that switches hundreds of thousands of calls daily. I joined the Switch team as a Data Analyst to make sense of the lots of system log reports. I did a lot of coding to automate reports that analyze thousands of traffic records. But we are so family-like in the team that I ended up becoming a Switch configuration engineer too. And the fun part of being in Switch is that no one argues with you. You know so much that whatever you say has got to be right. You are at the back end; you make things work. 

A typical day at work involves me getting to work late. Though not every day. Then I power on my work PC. It's like no other PC in the entire company; special thanks to the geek part of me. I log in to the Exchange configuration terminals. I start Outlook. By now the phones would have been ringing. About 8 telephone lines are terminated on my desk phone. And you will (almost) never get a busy tone when you call any of them. The phone is configured to hunt with the phone on the desk next to mine, which I have to pick when the owner is not on sit. And so you could say I've got 2 desk phones and 8 phone lines. Occasionally, the phones will ring from one call to another. When I first joined I was having headache every day. It was extremely difficult concentrating on any task. Desk phones have the most annoying ring tones and mine have no silence setting. So in between picking phone calls, I reply to mails, run some configurations, do some data analysis, go for lunch, do more configurations, continue my data analysis, reply to mails. Then when it's 5:30pm, I take out time to write an article or do some personal stuff and still pick calls and fix issues that can't wait till the next day. I close between 6:00pm and 8:00pm.

It's the kind of job I enjoy: very tasking and mentally stimulating. And I have got the loveliest colleagues anyone can have, the best boss in the world and a big office. And I'm not kidding about the boss part. He gets us gifts every time he travels to his home country. The Hugo Boss Orange EDT I currently use is a gift from him. And have you imagined calling your boss to help out with a weekend job because his house is closer to the office than yours? Well, come to my department and you won't need to imagine to see it happen. By the way, did I tell you he is also the GM Technical (CTO)?