Most company IT departments are in the basement. Makes sense, because it’s where the servers are best kept, and IT people have to be around for the servers…supposedly. In my experience, they mostly just keep themselves going, but it’s a precaution. And it’s cooler underground.
So no, the idea of our department being in the basement doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that we’re not allowed outside the basement. Seriously, we enter around the back, straight into a featureless room that takes us to a lift that goes up and down one floor, and all our work is done remotely. That’s it; we don’t have clearance for the rest of the building.
Meanwhile, it’s been in the news: Lawrence Corp forges legendary partnership with various Bayside electricians! I can hear everyone partying, just one floor above us, but none of us have clearance to join in. Not that we’re qualified electricians or anything, but if it’s something to do with electricity or rewiring, you’d think we’d be the first ones to know. We do a lot of smaller electrical work, and they send down broken equipment for us to fix all the time. If our company is going to be working with electricians in some capacity, it just makes sense to fully-brief the IT guys. But nope…we heard about it in the news. Lawrence Corp, everybody. Don’t ask us anything about it: we just work there.
The only reason I’m still here is the salary, which is leagues better than any other place where I’d be doing the same job, and the name to put on the CV once I leave. Oh hey, maybe I could do my training and qualify as a home electrician. It’s not incredibly far from what I already do, plus commercial electricians, Bayside based or otherwise, seem to have a much better chance of talking with and receiving acclaim from the boss of this company than the people who work here every single day.
I don’t even know what the boss looks like…
-Stan