Back in the early 2000s, I was an IT intern at an agricultural engineering facility. I literally worked on a farm. The company did scientific research

The Magic of Boredom

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2021-07-20 01:00:09

Back in the early 2000s, I was an IT intern at an agricultural engineering facility. I literally worked on a farm. The company did scientific research and engineering on different kinds of corn oil. I was hired by an IT manager who had thus far ran the IT department by himself. I was the first hire he had ever made. As I would soon learn, his expectations for my role were quite limited.

Why the backup tapes, you ask? Let’s just say the company’s IT practices were a tad dated. All company data was kept on the internal network, which was backed up daily. The data backups did not magically disperse to “the cloud”. Instead they were kept on an on-site physical server, which stored the data on larger-than-VHS-cassette sized backup tapes. These tapes would fill up, and I’d swap them.

After that was done, technically I was done for the day. Of course, I ended up doing other things, some of which I’ll talk about in this post. But I wasn’t hired to do those things. The only thing the IT manager had in mind for me was ensuring these backup tapes were swapped. Everything else was bonus.