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The engineer
By Tina Griego
It's been strange how life takes its turns. I look back, and it's been fast and furious, really. I really don't know how I got into what I'm doing. I graduated in 1993 from Colorado State University. I consider myself on my third career. I've been at Sun Microsystems for six months. I'm a front-line tech support engineer. The division of Sun I work in is called Global Enterprise Service Delivery. We cover tech support of Sun's top two percent of their customers. And they're huge customers, like MCI WorldCom. If these customers have problems or issues or repair concerns, things like that, they call us. Our job is basically to log the service order, triage the call and figure out the severity. To succeed in this business, you need the right training tools. The high-tech world moves so quickly that if you stall in your training you're going to get left behind. Typically, I handle 35 calls a day. We are a 24-7 mission critical department. There is somebody always there. I work Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. I basically stay pretty consistent with that. If something is going on, I will stay late. That's no big deal. Everybody works however long it takes, but our management is really good as far as getting us comp time. If we put in 14 hours, they'll say come in late tomorrow, sleep in, or leave early. Throughout college, I worked for a landscape company in Denver. They hired me after college. I worked for them for a year and a month and decided I was just not going where I needed to go in that company. So I left and went to another in-state company where I was a landscape designer. I worked there for six months and just threw my hands up and said, "I've had enough." I went to work for a finance company in Lakewood as a collector, but I volunteered for a system administration position. I had had a little bit of computer experience. I was at that company for 41/2 years, and that's more or less how I got into the high-tech industry. Money hasn't been all that important to me. I mean work is something you do more hours of the week than anything else except for sleep maybe. So you really have to enjoy it. I guess the most important thing is the challenge. That's what I like about this job. No two days are the same. It's pretty exciting. I'm surrounded by a lot of really great people. I do miss the creativity of my old job. I miss being able to look back on something, on a project you've worked on over the course of a day, and really see something that you've created with your hands. You don't get that sense here, but you get a more intrinsic sort of feeling that you've accomplished something at the end of the day, like helping a customer out whose back was really against the wall.
It is a high-pressure job. Most of the time you deal with pretty level-headed people on the phone. You do deal with some irate people. You know, we're in the service industry, so you have to remain level-headed and courteous. I deal with it basically by not taking work home with me. When I leave work at the end of the day, I don't look back. I don't make work my life. July 25, 1999 Colorado Millennium 2000
is a yearlong project by the Denver
Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4
and the Colorado Historical Society |
