[Magdalen] Interesting Times

[cady soukup]

In a few days, I will receive another corporate laptop.

I work from home (mostly) as a sub-contractor to a company working for
CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services). The company provides
administration services to the ESRD (End Stage Renal Disease)
contract.

TMI: When I started, I worked for GDIT (General Dynamics IT). They
lost the admin contract to another company; no one contacted me about
working for said company, so I found another job. Some weeks later, HP
(Hewlett Packard) contacted me and asked me why I hadn't completed my
resume and job application (what resume & job application?!). They
gave me the web page, I finished, and a few weeks later they called
and asked why I hadn't responded to the job offer (what job offer?).
So I responded, and worked for HP for about a year until they decided
to focus HP on hardware and spin off "HPE" (Hewlett Packard
Enterprise) for their cloud services and government contracts. A year
after that, HPE decided to "spin-merge" the government contract
business with CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation) into a new company
called DXC Technology (no known acronym, just letters).

I won't go into the changes and updates to the job description, system
architecture, software applications, and user interfaces. They, too,
have been a constant challenge. We are, by hook and by crook, by creak
and by crack, moving everything into "The Cloud" - which is another
way to say, if you don't have full internet access, you cannot do the
job. Given our current public infrastructure, what could possibly go
wrong?

In late 2017, DXC Technology decided to perform another "spin-merge"
of its USA government contracts with two other companies into a new
company. Official date May 1st, official name To Be Announced. But
they are sending me a laptop in the mail.

So, since I left my husband's company after working there for 25
years, I have worked on government contracts. Doing roughly the same
job, I have been employed by GDIT > HP > HPE > DXC Tech > ?New
Company?

And I will have 4 computers on my desk. My own (MacOS 10.13.3); the
CMS laptop (Win7); the HP>HPE>DXC Tech laptop (Win10); and a new
laptop (Win10? RHEL? ?something else?).

Tech-World: if you don't want to "move with the times" and re-learn
everything every few months, you don't want to be in it.
Unfortunately, the techies are driving, and all they see are shiny new
toys to be mastered.

Cady