- Provided support and answered questions
- Learned a bit about 3D modeling from an animator there
- Networked with people that would ultimately be pretty helpful
- Completed two projects, one of them using this new thing (at the time) called Java.
When I needed to find something different, I went back to the contract house that I had worked through before. They had a position open for a Systems Administrator at Kodak supporting the folks who write the documentation for Kodak products. It looked like a good position, so I took it on.
There was no problem with the job itself, but there were two other direct-hired system administrators, and one of them was particularly thrifty with giving access. So even though I was hired to help lighten his workload, he didn’t want to provide the resources to even start on it.
While it may seem like a gripe against him, what it really taught me was that if you don’t share the information that you have, there’s no one else that will be able to do the job and you will be stuck with it. He liked that situation because he felt it meant job security, but what it ended up doing is leaving him with more work to do.
After a few months things did loosen up and the projects I was put on went through fine. The downside to this was that the person who had them initially (see previous paragraphs) didn’t like that they succeeded. Ultimately they leveraged management to terminate the contract to protect their positions.