Last month, my good friend Scott, who got me my current job, left the company for greener pastures. October 19th was his last day. Scott built the entire Cisco IP infrastructure here at the company, and aside from the firewall connecting everything, understands it better than anyone else on the planet. The last year has been a wild ride of learning how everything is configured while simultaneously maintaining it and extending it for new projects. There are pieces of it that I don’t understand fully, particularly where multicast is concerned.

One mild panic and several beers after we got the news, my boss and I sat down to figure out what we were going to do about it. Initially, we spent a lot of time considering pulling Brady from another department in the company. Brady is an extremely bright guy, working in the QA department, which tests and implements the software coming out of development. He doesn’t have any real experience with routing, switching, and IP in general. After a lot of consideration, we decided that it would be better to hire someone who already understands the job, to avoid the considerable amount of time and training it would take for Brady to jump in.

We interviewed several people, and were very close to hiring Brad, a friend of mine from my Convergys days. In the eleventh hour, upper management indicated a strong preference for moving Brady into the position. In the end, that’s what we did.

Brady spent last week in a CCNA boot camp in Phoenix, and passed the test. Sometime this week things might settle down enough that we will have time to go over the network with him to bring him up to speed.

In related news, I have business cards. This is a first for me – I don’t recall ever having business cards before. I would have had them when I first got this job back in August of 2004, but I was lazy about ordering them. Considering the new job title of “Senior Network Administrator,” it’s probably a good thing I waited until now to order them.