Tuesday was the first day on the job for not only myself, but the new Ivy Tech intern. (I am currently employed by the school district in this little corner of southeast Indiana as a part time IT staff member.)

I had the opportunity to show the new intern (Tim) around and I let him shadow me for the day to see what exactly he could expect. My first impressions of him are very positive- he has the aptitude, the willingness to learn, and the necessary communications skills.

Tim also can take it as well as he dishes it out. We were working on a couple Windows 98 machines in one of the fifth grade classrooms. Both were having printer problems and Tim was handling one machine while I was finagling with the other. For some reason, the machine would not recognize other computers on the network and would not see any network printers. I could log onto the domain, access file shares on network volumes, and ping remote servers, but for some reason, the other machines on the network were unavailable.

Tim happened to find this amusing enough to comment, “Maybe it doesn’t like you.” As if he had fallen out of favor with God in heaven, Tim’s amusement turned to wide eyes when the workstation he had succeeded in re-enabling network printing on Blue Screened.

“Not as much as yours dislikes you, apparently,” I retorted.

After taking the machine out of the domain and putting it back in a couple times, I had network printing services back up again. Since by this time it was four in the afternoon, and Tim and I had been quite productive in resolving a week’s worth of accumulated repair requests, I suggested that we could probably justify calling it a day.