Brooklyn North, a small company in Halifax, develops applications
to help companies use the Internet as a business tool. The company
has a network of about 25 computers, and Susanne makes sure they
can communicate with each other and the Internet. She calls her
job "sort of schizophrenic" because, in addition to her network
responsibilities and her role supporting the system's users, she
also works on a database, extracting information and doing Visual
Basic programming.
Susanne is
a one-woman support team, doing everything from troubleshooting
hardware problems to supplying new passwords, to solving network
trouble.
"One important
responsibility is acting as a resource for other people in the
company. Certainly the responsibility to keep the network running
and functional is a major one. It's also the one I'm most paranoid
about, so I'm studying it the most."
She faced
one of her worst crises early on. "Not realizing that sending
out great globs of e-mail very quickly could clog our server,
I did my morning check and realized the server was not responding
- and that our people could not get onto the Internet. Now that
I know how to fix it, it seems trivial. But at the time, I felt
really sick for about an hour as I slowly, slowly figured out
what to do."
The feeling
that she just doesn't know enough is what Susanne likes least
about the job. On the other hand, she says, "if I knew everything
about it, I would be bored."
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