Ducks swim underwater, and other things a software administrator learns

On my first day on the job as a software administrator, the Help Desk manager handed me a sticky note with the software support line phone number. Below the number, he’d taped a package of Tylenol. “You’re going to need this,” he said.

As a high school graduate with a couple of years’ experience sweating in the company tape library and print shop, I’d somehow become qualified to apply software patches, backup call center data, and modify the call tracking software according to the current month’s departmental needs needs of crabby people calling to complain that OUR software wasn’t working. My manager’s manager hired me because he thought I had a hungry look to me. I’m assuming that wasn’t sexual harassment.

One month into my training on the system, the previous software administrator left the company and the application was mine, all mine. I can’t tell you the name of the company with which I spent hours on the phone begging and pleading for help to make their damn software run properly, but it sounded a lot like the little nickname I gave them: Bend Over.

Theoretically Bend Over was releasing a new improved version of the application and I just had to insert the diskettes in the proper order and upload it to our mainframe servers. After that, I was to teach myself how to use the software and then customize it to meet all our call center needs. I was woefully inexperienced and would read the software release notes and manuals and try to figure out, if the software ever DID load properly, what I might be able to do next. And then I would go home to my boyfriend, a wonderfully sensitive database administrator, who would listen to me complain and then say, “Well honey, maybe some people just aren’t cut out to support software.”

We were desperate to migrate to the new release because the current version seemed to be disintegrating before our eyes. Data was lost, fields were missing, drop-down menus no longer dropped. Bend Over had a touch-tone menu that would put your call into a queue, and would announce, “You are caller number thirty-eight. Your estimated wait time is two hours and seven minutes.” I’d put on the speaker phone and dance in my office to the one long song loop that was supposed to be a mixture of jazz and whale songs. I’d write bad poetry or angry letters to my father. Or I’d stare out my window and watch the ducks swimming in the big business park pond.

Legend had it that the pond had once been a quarry and was very deep. In the cafeteria, people whispered that the police had found an abandoned car in there, and when they hauled it out they found unspecified signs of foul play in the vehicle. Sometimes people fished along the edge, but when a couple of guys took a sailboat onto the water, the police came and hauled them away. From my fifth floor vantage point, they were sailing to the song of the whales.

There had to be about a hundred ducks out on that pond, and I liked to watch them bob around while I instant messaged my friends. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one disappear. I thought about the terrible depth of that pond – who knew what was really in there? Giant fish, maybe, that could snatch a duck right off the surface and chomp them up in one bite.

During a Bend Over support call that was getting me nowhere but frustrated, I followed the ducks with my eyes. Another disappeared. I kept watching. There went another. And then the first one reappeared much farther away, perky and healthy. Apparently ducks can swim underwater, a fact I hadn’t known before, and I chose not to display my ignorance to anyone.

So I shook my head and took another couple of Tylenol, and updated my resume.