Sprint employee

The most unique thing to happen today is my receipt of a spam offer for a Johnny Cash Mastercard.  The second most unique thing is a job offer.  It's a huge pay cut for me, but the job is super_nerd_cool!!!!!111  It's a vampire shift in the Sprint Network Control Center.  I have been to the Sprint campus and I've seen the hive of geekdom that monitors the Sprint network from Puerto Rico to Maine to Hawaii.  The cubes are literally in honeycomb shape with aisles that zigzag.  When you're in one of these cubes, you're completely surrounded by large flat screen monitors two high.  And when you stand up to peer over the cube walls, you find yourself surrounded again by large flat screen TVs hanging from the ceiling and tuned to the news and weather channels.  I will have the Sprintlink internet backbone folks as cube neighbors and a clear view into the wireless voice network area. My area monitors the wireless data area.  Basically, the 2G and 3G internet access or text messaging or ringtone downloads cross the portion of the network I'll be monitoring, etc.  It's a rare opportunity to work with every division of Sprint and get my head around their entire network architecture.  The overnight nature of the shift leaves the days free for school work or other pursuits.  I suspect I'll workout in the morning following my shift, have a nice big meal, then sleep in the middle of the day.  That starts on September 5.  So, I have a deadline to finish all my little projects. 

September 9, I start school.  It's a network security course taught by a Sprint employee, Mr. Xie.  Since Sprint will be reimbursing my tuition, I can use the super low interest school loan money to pay off higher interest debt. . . and I have accumulated plenty of that over the past couple of months being "self-employed".

I'm going to celebrate by playing some drop-in hockey tonight.