Blast from the past

I must apologise to the thousands who follow my writings religiously for not writing more often....oh, ok, i know, fine. I must apologise to the 17 people who follow my writings religiously (thanks Honey, I love you too). I didn't realise over a year had passed from my last entry. This is clearly unacceptable. I therefore have to make it up and write lots more. You can now expect about 2 articles a year :)

But seriously, lots have changed since i last wrote. It is sometimes fun to look back at change over the past 12 months. For instance, i was in a different industry all together !! Yes, it has happened. I took a leap of faith and transported myself away from the world of Information Technology, or IT for those abbreviation-spewing techies. I am now in the world of telecomunications, mobile telecommunications to be exact. Yup, i went and joined a celco.....apologise for the abbreviation. Some things never change. After well over a decade in IT, old habits die hard. But now, there is a whole new world of abbreviations to learn and start spewing....3G, HSDPA, ADSL, AP, ARPU, CDR, and on and on and on. And not to mention the new internal abbreviations that were created by this celco which i am professionally prohibited to pen for fear of identification.

Which brings back fond memories of my previous place of employment, IBM, where there were lots of abbreviations...there were really lots of it. There were so many of it, a special department was created to supervise it's creation and usage (DoACU) which stands for Department of Abbreviation Creation and Utilization. This also brought about plenty of standard responses from people upon official introductions (gazoontite was quite common). But seriously, IBM (note that even the official name is an abbreviation), was quite a fun but complex place to work in. It was so complex, scientists found an extinct species labouring away in front of a computer in a back office in basement 17 of the Almaden Research Centre. Peers called it a Manager.

In fact IBM was so big and powerful in its hey days that it announced at one point that it would outsourse 200% of its workforce to India and China. They have devised a strategy to reduce costs and provide IBM with a backup of every person in the company. Every job in IBM will be duplicated in India and China.

But seriously, my time in IBM was fun and most educational. A lot of people say others who leave IBM for other jobs become very successful. Now when did i leave IBM....

So, where was I......oh yes, i left the comfort of IT and took a leap of faith. Joined a celco. Didn't know what to expect (yes yes, everyone who moves to a new industry says that but scientists recently have proven that it is indeed a blatant lie).

Now it has been 6 months since i came on board and i feel very at home. I hope my other colleagues feel the same. However i do miss my IT abbreviation-spewing days. Now, i spend many hours trying to master celco specific abbreviations. Here is where i am at moment:

"we have ALU equipment as proposed by Jim Bates before (SDP by ALU). As such we need to remove ALU NODE B inside the COW"

haha, eat your heart out Dilbert !!