Tuesday, November 19, 2013

911 - (MedBoard: Joint Base Lewis-McChord) Day 164

Sent my squad leader the usual text this morning "MOU today". Headed into the naval shipyard in Bremerton and started my morning routine of checking my army and navy emails, then surfing the web for a while. After about an hour I took off with a co-worker to the regional naval 911 center. We had 3 machines on our system that were not working correctly. This is the first time I went in there and the place is pretty secure, I won't go into detail…but for obvious reasons they don't want anyone without the proper authority having access to the area or the operators. Once we got in I saw what looked like a computer nerd's dream. Each user's workstation had at least 7 screens that were like a curved wall in front of them. The machines we are working on are not mission essential, but they are somewhat important and needed to get fixed as soon as possible. We sat down at the first workstation and after just a quick minute we had it up and running properly, it just needed an admin to be logged in, a web extension installed and to be joined to the domain. The other two machines were not the same story. We actually were stuck on the second machine for what would turn out to be pretty much the rest of the day.

While hanging out in the 911 center I got to hear just how crazy it can be on a slow day. The operators seemed to have 3 conversations going at once. They would be talking to each other, take a call, dispatch, and keep all three conversations going at the same time. I couldn't keep everything straight. Luckily they had some donuts in there because we worked right through lunchtime. By the time we left a little after 1400 my co-worker and I both felt pretty much defeated. I'm still learning how this system works and I do know my way around Windows, but I have been primarily a Mac person in the past. I felt pretty much useless the entire time, I just manned the computer and did what my co-worker would have me type or do. Nothing seemed to work, but it seems like such a small problem. The entire program is just opening up a window in an Internet Explorer window, but the darn ActiveX control would just not load no matter what we did.

We headed back to our office and decided to try again later. I quickly ate my lunch…I was starving by this point. By the time I finished, I surfed the web for a bit and then left for the day. I hate days where it feels like you get nothing done, we just spun our wheels all day trying everything we could think of with no results.

I headed home and did schoolwork and then went to the YMCA with my wife…I worked out my frustrations on the elliptical machine.

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