A Possible Reason More Women Aren't In Tech Fields, or

The BBQ Pit
1

Don’t Ask Me, I’m Just The Girl.

So our core business server died in the wee hours this morning. When the junior tech discovered it, he also he discovered he needed help to move another server and a drive array off it in order to pop the case. He didn’t call me, because I was due in another hour, and I can’t lift this stuff either. He called one of my co-workers…let’s call him Supertech, to help him shift the equipment. Junior tech had a boot disk ready, and was about to pop the top to check out the error LED when Supertech took over.

Before anyone could stop him, Supertech brought down the Helpdesk server (identical model), gutted it, and swapped the drives over. He’s having a wonderful time when I wander in.

Now technically speaking, these are not exactly my systems. Anymore. But I built the damn things, and I kept them stable for six years, and I do perhaps know a bit about the equipment. He has never worked with it before.

Supertech tells me what he’s done, and I’m too stunned for heart failure. I am also not particularly surprised when the transplant fails, either. Same symptoms as the original box. However, when I proffer a couple of suggestions, I am roundly ignored. Too busy trying to be the hero, what with executives and other concerned folks swirling about. Supertech is not getting anywhere with the machinery, and asks for help. Does he ask the person who built it? Nnnnnoooooo, gotta call one of the guys. Then another one…I can’t even look at the monitor when it comes up, there’s so many guys in the way. I’m too little to shove 'em out of my way.

I go surf a bit, and see if anyone will come talk to me. Shortly thereafter, one of the guys (smarter than Supertech) does indeed come talk to me and asks a couple questions. I answer, and give him the manuals I had on my desk, open to the appropriate sections. I tried to offer my assistance, but was again waved off. Three hours later, in oracular tones, they announce the discovery of an error message when they try to boot the server.

At this point, I don’t want to be involved anymore. It’s going from bad tech practice to worse, and I can’t talk with these people. Even the managers are nodding their heads in time with these dudes. I begin to get a little snarky…

I even volunteered to go reassemble the Helpdesk system, so I could attempt to revive our Remedy and System Management Server stuff, and was gently, but firmly told that it wouldn’t be necessary, they would take care of it for me but I had to be patient. Supertech all but patted me on the head! Good thing he remembered last time he tried that…:mad:

Fine then.

I’m going home. Call me when you guys are done. Obviously I lack the requisite body parts to do a decent job. Colour me surprised, I didn’t know it turned screwdrivers, too.:rolleyes: I’ll remember this next time you guys want cables relocated and can’t fit your arms under the racks.
Note: I am aware that not ALL guy techs are like this. Even these guys aren’t usually this bad. However, I’m feeling just a little bitter ATM…

2

I see their point of view; what if you had menstruated all over it?

3

Revtim, that cracked me up!

tisiphone, your coworkers are idiots. My fiancee puts up with the same sort of crap, so I have a sense of how irritating it is.

4

C’mere so I can slap you, okay? :wink:

5

I admit, it’s an obvious shame of our world that women tend to be assumed to be marginalized simply because they’re women. It’s like the world assumes women can’t handle math or technology. And it’s a damn shame.

  • Jonathan "Husband of a software developer’ Chance
6

Stuff like this always reminds me of the time my sister went to some store to buy a hard drive for her computer. She asks the sales guy how to install the thing, and he says to my sister (who has a graduate degree in Biomedical Engineering), “Do you have a boyfriend or somebody to install it for you?”

I really wish I could have seen her face when he said that… I bet it was something like the face she made when we were kids and I tossed a dog treat in her mouth while she was yawning.

7

Revtim, that cracked me up.

I can’t even imagine how frustrating this is for you, tisiphone. Not asking the person who put something together when there’s a problem with it? Hmph! How long has it been since you were in charge of it, though?

8

About six months or so, but you see here’s how it went - they carefully peeled my fingers off it and pried it away from me, then didn’t put anybody ELSE in charge. So I’ve still been doing odds and sods to it - like adding drives, reallocating volumes, a vrepair/dsrepair once in a while, you know. Stuff the glory hounds didn’t want to do - they were busy with the Sun boxes and testing out the new Dells.

So technically, they weren’t my job, but practically they still were.

9

Tisiphone, I know how you feel. I have been in the techy field for a while and everyone (mostly male) seems to think that I dont have the same brain capacity…It pisses me off so bad. I work hard, I learn quickly…there is no difference between a male or female working on servers/routers…whatever! If you have given me the job to administer servers, then by god, let me do the fucking work! There is nothing worse than a guy saying "Oh, let me handle this, go back to whatever it was you were doing:, just because I am a female. I could work circles around your dumbass while you sit there and check out FARK or consumptionjunction or whatever the hell it is that has chicks with flames coming out of their asses! I have the knowledge to do the job, if I didnt, I wouldnt have been hired…so let me fix the problem YOU have just caused!!! That’s what the fuck I get paid for!!

Ohh, I feel better now…:smiley:

10

tisiphone, I guess I’ve been lucky, then…I worked as a mechanic for 13 years and my all-male co-workers always respected me and never hesitated to ask me for advice if they needed it, and if I needed advice, they’d give it with no condescending tones.

Sorry to hear there are still a lot of assholes out there.

11

Another satisfied Revtim-reader, here.

I’ve been in that situtation myself, sitting back and knowing what’s wrong while other, pushier techs crawl all over the equipment, making it worse, etc. I’m just too damn polite.

12

Way back in 1974, I was an avionics technician in a training squadron in North Island, CA. One of the senior techs, Pete, and I were troubleshooting a particularly bizarre problem. I suggested that we check the power supply. Nah - can’t be that, claimed Pete. So we swapped out every other component in the system. Sometimes the problem changed, but there was always a problem. I kept bringing up the power supply and Pete kept blowing it off.

Finally, since nothing else worked, he agreed to try replacing the power supply. Golly, gee - it fixed the problems. To his credit, Pete recognized that maybe I did know something. A few months later, he paid me an amazing compliment - saying he’d like to have me serve at sea with him (this was back before women were assigned to ships)

My point? Eventually these boneheads figure it out. Hang in there.

13

And if you ever do manage to succeed, then they call you a “bitch”, a “bulldyke”, say you must be “on the rag” every time you are screaming at them for some atrocity they have committed to the equipment.

The only thing to do is to work your way up past them, while they beat their chests, grab their penii, make odd noises like that criminal on Home Improvement, and surf E-Bay all day. Then when you get promoted, start the Great Purge, and send them packing. When they come into your office bawling because they have no job due to surfing the Net for 30 hours a week instead of working, say “I thought only women were too weak and stupid to cry - that is what you said, isn’t it?” and then call security to have them duck-walked out the front door.

Sorry…I was personalizing your problems with me.

14

My sympathy, bigtime. I work in the automotive field, specifically in new product information on vehicles. If I had a nickel for each time I or one of my female cow-orkers was asked if there was a man the customer could talk to I’d have a big fat pile of nickels. Whenever I get one of those I wax hard core tech all over them until they’re forced to admit that I know what I’m talking about.

Don’t mess with the gearhead chicks–we have to know twice as much to be given half the credit! :rolleyes:

15

Hehe.

One morning, at the last place I worked, we arrived in the morning to find that we couldn’t access any of the server resources; I put in a call to the helpdesk (who explained that, yes, they were aware of the problem and they were attempting to remedy the situation).

Anyway, I heard later that after about twenty minutes of the techs trying and failing to bring the machine up, one of the (female) juniors said “I’ll go and take a look at it, shall I?”

Choruses of laughter and derision.

“There’s nothing that you can do at the server; it’s just a plain box with a couple of LEDs on it”

“Yes, but maybe something has…”

More scorn and derision; the techs turn their back on the junior huddle around their screen, muttering to themselves; half an hour has now passed and the whole company is getting twitchy about the downtime.

The junior returns from the machine room.

“Um, guys… the server isn’t there”

(It turns out that during the night, someone had broken into the machine room through a side window, somehow circumvented the security system and stolen the machine).

16

I wish I were a fly on the wall when SuperTech tries to turn this cock-up into a Warstory Of Glory. I’d be really interested in seeing how he justifies blowing off the system builder.

Tisi, you should come work for my old company… about half the technical heavy-hitters are women, and some of them are Industry Names. I’d dearly love to see SuperTech butt heads with, oh maybe, Angel. Scarduzio, that is. Technician, Systems and Networking guru, and Adminstrator par excelance. Scarduzio. From Jersey. With uncles in the garbage hauling business. Oh, sure, she’s not connected or anything… At least, that’s what she says…

How would SuperTech fare against a tough Italian girl from the hard families of Jersey, one whom is also a damned good tech?

17

Tisi, I think you are my twin…

So a couple of months ago one of my Netware DS servers crashes - hard (Sounds like yours are Netware too). Won’t even boot with a dos disk in it. Gets to the part of bootup where it searches for SCSI and then …

So I get out the screwdriver. And call Compaq. And start resetting stuff. And of course the moment I pull out the screwdriver, three male techs come in and pretty soon there isn’t even room for me near the server, they are pulling at parts and dinkin’ around and very excited - they are loving every moment of my hardware failure.

An hour later, the server still won’t even boot to dos. And I say screw it - go back to my desk and yank it from the tree. Move all the replicas to other places (this is a big damn worldwide tree) and within about an hour, every thing is sync’ing good enough to go home and there isn’t a user in the world that’s noticed. That’s why we have redundant DS servers. Have to do a little mop up the next day.

I order a new server.

BTW, the old server, we moved to the lab. Reset everything again, and its purring like a kitten in my test cluster.

When hired for this job, my boss asked me what my weak points were. I said “hardware…in my experience there is always some guy who is just really EXCITED to hold that screwdriver, so I haven’t had too much opportunity to practice.”

18

:growling:

He’s still doing it…I’m going to have to hurt him soon. He’s not been involved in the goddamn fucking upgrade project, he’s not slated to be working on the goddamn fucking upgrade project, it’s MINE and if he doesn’t quit talking like he knows what’s going on while proving the opposite I’m going to have to sink him in the river. Ya know, Anthracite, if they keep pissin’ me off like this, I will have no choice but to take over. I don’t really want to, because frankly, playing kindergarten cop never really appealed to me, and that’s 3/4 of management’s job. [sub]Besides, they wouldn’t give it to me. I have a bit of a Reputation already. Something about being a bit mouthy.[/sub]. Just let me sit in a corner and play with my machines.

Mangetout, I heard that story! You worked there? Tell me, howinthehell that happened - and did they ever find the server?

I have had the customer demand to talk to one of the boys after I have given them an unpopular answer, in a couple cases I have been pushed to the point of saying “Why? So he can tell you the same thing in a deeper voice? Buddy, who do you think trained him?”

D’ya think your old company would give me a job, Tranquilis? I do Netware 4.1, I’m getting trained to upgrade and administer Netware 6.x, I can drive most flavours of Windows - workstation and server, program Cisco routers for 'most whatever you like, and can maintain a multiprotocol WAN with IPX/SPX, TCP/IP, and DECnet. I’ve also been on the virus response team, and part of the security team. Major applications I’ve supported are Groupwise 4.1a, MSSQL 7.0, and MS Systems Management Server 2.0 (deployment and support). I’d even go back to shudder front-line support if I had a decent work environment.

On the war-story bit? He doesn’t mention the system builder at all, so far. But he’s been careful not to tell the Tale around me, yet.

Dangerosa, indeed that’s it. I’ve been in the job eight years, and although I’ve been allowed to assemble systems, sometimes I’ve damn near had to physically pry the tools out of some guy’s hands. When we got our pretty new server in, with the new array and all the goodies, I nearly had to stab one of the juniors to death with a screwdriver. It was given to me to play with, getcher grubby paws off it. I’m sure there’s at least six trouble tickets awaiting your attention. Nope, I’m sure I don’t need any help, if I do, you can be sure I’ll ask.
Oh yeah, and it was his fault. The whole problem started because Supertech was working on a new backup system, and was running it in tandem with the old backup. Servers don’t like running two backups at the same time. :rolleyes: The SCSI controller disabled the array due to thrashing. Then, post-transplant, they ran into BIOS version issues, and the fact that the BIOS version on the new box didn’t support the SCSI card on the old box - newer BIOS, old SCSI tape drive. The new backup system is now in use, and there’s only one guy who knows how to run it - Supertech. Aaaaagh!

At least it’s a damn long weekend. Three days of bliss, and I’m not on the callout list!

19

Actually, Tisi, you sound like a very good fit. The main issues would be location and travel. It’s a mutli-national, but with a preponderance of business in the Continental 48, and travel is frequent. The other issue, is that you’d have to become familliar with the higher-end M$ products, because many of the clients are using them.

Actually, you sound a lot like me in technical experience, save that I’ve been doing Regulatory Systems support for the last 20 months, and have gotten a bit stale on my Netware (gonna get more stale: I’m making the perminant move to RegSystems).

The old company has some really serious Netware and Lotus players, and mostly (but not always), they’re women. You’d be right at home.

20

Oops…I missed that you’re already familiar with the M$ stuff.

Yeah, you’d fit damned well. I’d match you with Sandi, Penny, and Paul… You’d make the Novell-Team from Hell!