Solid Block of Ise

Today was the big day. The day that I mentioned in an earlier posting.

About 9 in the morning I took my bicycle down to town and met with some people. I met with the cheery girl that I up until now only knew as a voice on the phone. Her name was Linda and she was as cheery in real-life as she was on the phone. She did however have a very soft voice and I had some trouble hearing her at times, but other than that she was nice. I also met with one of the department-heads for the IT & Telecommunications department in the municipality. The third person was a man named Rolf, and it turned out that he would be my supervisor for the duration of this project. They were also very professional and we got along swimmingly.

We chatted a bit about what they do, and what I needed from them. All in all it was very efficient and I felt confident that this would work out to something beneficial.

Umeå municipality does all of its support in-house. They have a department that recieves whatever need fixed from all the parts of the system (schools, social system, the municipality itself) and then delegates it to a team of technicians. There’s some travel included in the job, since not everyone is located in the same building. The schools also tend to have a technician working to take care of the day-to-day events that need solved, but if they need bigger guns they just call someone up and schedule something. The municipality also runs its own server-park dedicated to all the systems that are needed to maintain the municipality - finances, schedules, payment, workers. Everything is managed in-house instead of subcontracted.

I also learned that Umeå was one of the earliest municipalities to take advantage of computerization, and have been doing this since the 1960’s. Kinda neat. It’s also interesting since a large number of people in the south of Sweden has a prejudiced attitude that northernes usually are some kind of troglodytes barely capable of not dragging their knuckles when they walk.

For my own part, I’m going to go through a two-week trial now, to see if this works well both for me and for the IT & Telecommunications department. We’re starting off soft, and on Tuesday my first day starts. We aimed for 10 hours of work per week (5 days @ 2 hours per day) but I suggested that we change this to 3 hours for three days instead. I felt that two hours a day was too little to get anything done, and I’d rather have it dispensed on slightly longer periods over fewer days.

That pretty much sums it all up. I’m really excited about this, somehow a blog-post just doesn’t convey it properly!

On a side-note, I’ve gotta say that we’re having a truly gorgeous fall up here! I arrived a lot earlier than expected, and this allowed me to relax a while. I took some snapshots while relaxing, and these two are somewhat pretty.

One of the grassy areas outside the municipal building. They’re remodeling inside, thus the ladder and crap in the background. The lawn was covered with dry leaves from the trees, and crunched nicely when tread upon. I took this photo after I was finished inside.

I sat in a nearby graveyard. It’s very calm and relaxing, and whenever I’m in the area and have time to spare I go there and sit a while. I don’t have any particular morbid interest in graveyards, but I do find them very calming and inspirational. Today the lighting was very conductive, and even though the fall-sun didn’t warm very much it was still very nice to sit there and ponder things.

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This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.