The prior post has resulted in thoughts of my period working for Gargantua. During that period of employment I was constantly multitasking.

While working for Gargantua I filled a number of different roles. During the majority of my time I was a Technical Support Engineer. I started with ISS (Industry Standard Servers i.e. platforms based on the Intel IA-32 chip family including EM64T) but over the course of several years I supported a number of other architectures ( PA-RISC , DEC Alpha, IA-64). The range of supported products also increased until at the end of my tenure I was supporting everything from HP and Compaq mobile devices through to NAS and SAN storage appliances.

A premium was placed on delivering high quality customer service. Simply providing a timely technical solution was not enough. During a support call I would be engaged in small talk and banter with the client (dead air was not permitted), entering notes into a database so as to create a complete and accurate record of my interaction with the client (marks removed for poor spelling or grammar; no integral spellchecker), conducting a search of product data sheets and other technical source material (needed to confirm the precise details of the customer product), referencing product literature to validate the present state of the customer’s system (all bios updates applied along with pertinent updates from the OS vendor and / or other involved ISV software), searching diagnostic records for evidence of any reported similar problem on the same hardware, followed by a search for similar error conditions on any hardware, conceptualizing a diagnostic plan of action to be followed in order to systematically eliminate specific hardware or software modules as the source of the error condition, all of this while bantering about the latest hockey, baseball, or football scores or whatever other topic the customer wished to introduce.

Today, there is no way I could emulate this past performance. Each of my “projects” is actually a mono-mania, a single point of focus that absorbs all of my attention. Even with this single point of focus I continue to introduce error, have problems maintaining attention, encounter gaps in my own awareness.

After writing the above, I realized that the “projects” demonstrate the application of the CCN. I summon a maximum effort in the attempt to produce work output well below my prior standard.