Which is true of most of this stuff, but then nobody’s really reading it, blah blah blah…ya know what, I will hereby no longer make any goofy apologies for the shyte I write here.

It was a day of two halves for Kevin the tech support agent. Before lunch I was Kev the tech support bad-ass: 14 calls in three hours. I RULE! After lunch – get this – seven calls in FIVE hours. Good Lord. It was like a tour of things I had no idea about: PostScript printing, the OS X Mail application, fax software, blah blah blah…oy. The plus is that I handled an Airport base station hard-reset decently well, though I now know for sure that the things take ten minutes at the minimum. Oh well, that’s better than 20 or 30 minutes. Even so, in certain calls this afternoon I felt like it was my first day. Vantive being down, and Tier 2 being in a meeting for over an hour, didn’t help one little bit.

The job so far goes in fits and spurts like this. Which is better than tech writing, I guess – that was one big blah – though you have to get used to the whole up and down thing. I’m taking a positive tack thus far, looking at every incoming call as a chance to be a tech support rock star. Let’s hope I AM one before my resolve runs out.

Speaking of which, today I printed out the application for permanent Apple employment (“badging,” in the biz). One of the questions took me aback, and was something I’d never seen before: “Could you have remained in the employ of the company, if you so desired?” The answer for NI is an unequivocal No. I was invited to resign. Ordered to resign. They did the resigning for me. Firing without the whole “firing” stigma. You get the idea.

So that put me in a sour NI flashback mode, realizing that no, my awful tech writing days are not entirely behind me. …Nor should they be, I realized upon further reflection; I don’t get to just set NI in a box and never think of it again. And despite my initial thoughts to the contrary, I’ll check “No” on that fateful question and start work on my, uh, positioning statements for the possible interview. Will that little yes/no question keep me from getting a job? Quite possibly. But that’s what happens in life, and you can’t fudge it.

You know what I miss about NI? The deli sandwiches in the cafeteria. Those thingies were some tasty tasty grub. It’s scary to realize that at least one place in the world – the NI cafeteria – is a place I will never, never visit again. Of course I’m a big softie, so maybe I’ll make one of my Cliftonian nostalgic trips in 10 years or so, when no one there cares about me any more. (I suspect that may already be the case.)