A Week in the Life of the CTS Manager

As the manager of CTS (Communications and Technical Services), Tim is very busy.  CTS is more than just IT.  The department has the typical IT services, including programming, networking, computer repair, help desk, and a sales counter for all your electronic needs.  In addition, CTS also includes telephone service, purchasing, installing solar systems for village teams, and repairing electronics from small appliances to radios used in the village for communication.  There is a blend of expatriates from four different countries and Papua New Guineans.  They come together to help all of us in our jobs.  This is Tim's story

A Week in the Life of the CTS Manager

By Tim Ellis

This week has been quite eventful.  It is not quite typical but there is always something happening in “the land of the unexpected.”  Back in December the air conditioning unit in the Help Desk area blew a compressor.  I had a spare unit and was working on getting it swapped out, but it had not made it to the top of my to-do list.

On Monday I sent my lead Network Engineer to Port Moresby to help one of our regional centers.  When I got up, Andrew tells me that my cat has left me a present on my door step, a dead mouse.  We do appreciate this because it means mice are not in the house.  I arrive at work to find out that sometime during the night the main air conditioning unit in the network room had gone out and the temperatures were getting very warm in there.  The secondary unit in there is struggling to keep up.   A network switch in our Construction Department had gone down, which my other Network Engineer was able to restore fairly quickly.  Later in the morning a switch at the Primary School campus went down.  This took him most of the day to get back up but only stayed up for a couple of hours.  I was scolded by my kids for it being down because they were not able to log onto the network and do their computer classes. 

On Tuesday, Andrew tells me that my cat has left me another mouse on my door step.  I arrive at work to find that both a/c units are down.  The main one was fairly quickly restored, but temps have gotten high and it can only get them out of the critical range.  The secondary unit has blown a compressor motor; not good.  Praise God we have a spare.  I guess that’s why God didn’t let it get to the top of my to-do list.  It takes about three hours for the spare to be installed, and it is working great.  Around 11am our network monitoring program stops working.  We are blind to the status of our network without it.  Praise God I was able to call in help and they got it back up in an hour. 

Wednesday there is no mouse on my doorstep.  I arrive at work to find that all is well. 

Today is Thursday and Andrew tells me that there is another mouse on our doorstep.  I am taking the day off.