Ten years ago this week I found myself in Las Vegas, not to enjoy its infamous nightlife or try my luck at the casinos, but to face what I would rank as one of the most challenging achievements of my life — maybe second only to earning my Master’s degree. I was in Vegas attending a grueling boot camp crash course to earn my Microsoft MCSE certification (server engineer). My mission? To conquer not one, not two, but seven MCSE exams in the span of just two weeks.

Our schedule was brutal. We spent up to 10 hours a day absorbing the intricacies of Microsoft technologies only to clock out and hit the books back in our hotel rooms for another 5 to 6 hours each night. This included weekends. I think in the span of fifteen days, my friends and I (Ellston and Lee) made it to a casino twice. To be honest, I’m not sure I could do it today; even then, ten years ago, I was tested. There were many nights I stopped studying at midnight and was downstairs at seven the next morning eating breakfast. I believe this was the trip I discovered Monster energy drinks.

While I was never against certifications, I have never felt that they were the end-all in regards to judging a person’s knowledge. Prior to earning my MCSE I had been working with servers (literally IN a server room!) for fifteen years. Certification was something I had never pursued… until our organization was assimilated and I was informed I would need to obtain this certification to remain in my position. After a decade and a half, someone who didn’t know me came along and demanded I needed a piece of paper to prove I could do the job I had been doing.

If their plan was to see me fail, they greatly underestimated the willpower and resilience of an O’Hara fueled by spite and a vendetta. Not even the nightly temptations of slot machines, scantily clad women, or gallon-sized margaritas could lure me away from those books. In our class of approximately twenty, about half made it to the finish line. I had always heard boot camps were the easy route to certification. Covering and being tested over 200-page manuals every two days may be some people’s idea of easy, but not mine. The test questions ranged from memorizing obscure minutia to working story problems in an adaptive test setting — meaning once you missed a question in a particular area, the test would then focus on that topic in an attempt to fail you.

Within a year of earning my MCSE, I changed departments. I guess I’ve watched one too many 80s movies, the ones where at the end when the good guy — having bested the bad guy in some competition or otherwise proving himself — is finally accepted. The two exchange a trophy, shake hands, or high five one another — usually the movie ends on a freeze frame of that moment. In real life, the bad guys just shrug and keep throwing more obstacles in your path. And another, and another. And eventually you realize there aren’t enough certifications in the world to prove yourself to some people. Eventually you learn it was never about the certification in the first place.

Aside from the taxing study schedule and stressful tests, my fondest memory of that week was hanging out and bonding with my coworkers Lee and Ellston. I had known Ellston for many years prior to that trip, but Lee and I were still trying to figure one another out and on that trip, when we realized we were the bizarro versions of one another from two different organizations, we finally clicked.

The long nights and the drama surrounding that time at work are all ancient history now, but the fun we had during that trip is what I remember best.

Not all stories are mine to tell, and some are told better over a beer than through a blog, but roughly six months after she applied for early retirement based on a disability, Susan received a phone call Tuesday afternoon informing her that Wednesday would be her last day of work with the FAA.

I’ve been to plenty of retirement parties over the past few decades. In fact, just last year Susan and I attended a retirement dinner for a coworker of ours. Roughly forty people came together at a local restaurant to eat, share stories, and toast a guy who spent a good portion of his life in public service. While waiting for the festivities to begin, I remember looking around the room and thinking “when Susan retires, we’re going to have to rent a concert hall.”

Instead, Susan was given one full work day to clean out her desk, close out her network accounts, retrieve any personal information from her email and computer, and transfer the current status of all her projects to her coworkers. Halfway through the day security disabled her network access, bringing a sudden and unceremonious end to both her workday and her career.

I’ve made this same joke a few times over the past few days — that I’m the guy who takes home office supplies, and Susan’s the one who, when she finds them, returns them to the office. Susan may be the most honest, most dedicated, and hardest working government employee on the planet. Since announcing her retirement, dozens and dozens of people have contacted each of us, some to make sure Susan’s okay (she is) but mostly to tell her how great it has been to work with (and in many cases, for) her. It’s difficult to express in words what a great and dedicated employee Susan has been for nearly three decades. Susan has made many sacrifices to give her all on every project, every single day. Not only has she made the FAA a better place (which she unarguably has), but she has been a positive influence on many people’s lives. She’s been a positive role model, a mentor, and to many, a friend. It’s not that the government could use another Susan O’Hara — it’s that they could use a thousand Susans.

Some of those achievements have come through personal sacrifice. Susan always done the right thing, even when it’s not the easy thing. She has stood up to people who weren’t doing what was best for project or the government in general. Over the years she has missed a few family celebrations because of work, but more often than that she has spent time in airports and in the air off the clock to ensure that she could attend band performances, school plays, and birthdays.

A couple of years ago, Susan was diagnosed with Lipoedema, which according to Wikipedia is “an abnormal build-up of fat in your legs and sometimes arms [that] can be painful and affect daily life.” Just last year Susan had three surgeries to deal with the nodules in her legs that, among other things, put so much pressure against her joints that her knees dislocate on a nearly daily basis. The condition is made worse by stress, and flying makes her legs swell up to the point where she cannot walk. After making a request for reasonable accommodations at work… all I can say is, it was heartbreaking to watch the agency in which she gave so much to treat her with such indifference.

I suppose I’m a bit more bitter about the way things happened than Susan is; then again, that’s me, and that’s Susan. Here is what Susan had to say about her retirement on Facebook:

I wanted to let you know that my last day with the FAA is Wednesday January 11. After walking into the FAA 28 years ago as a contractor hired to type (yes, TYPE) in ‘all’ the accident reports for the agency, and then as a federal employee for 24 years, 3 months and 1 day (who’s counting!), I never thought I would see this day come so fast.

This job has given me so much opportunity, from travelling internationally, working on surprise inspection projects, converting the accounting systems to be Y2K compliant, building amazing new systems that solved big problems, to the opportunity to set strategy for and to help hire in the next generation of FAA employees and managers. The most meaningful things this career has given me is a fantastic set of colleagues and (so many!) experiences that I will continue to cherish. I will surely take all of my fond memories of the FAA into the next chapters of life. Thank you for all you’ve done to support, mentor, and believe in me and each other. Keep up the great work, but don’t forget to have a good laugh every day!

Take care, and thanks for all the memories! Thank you for your time! Be well, do good deeds and keep in touch!!!

– Susan O’Hara (January 11, 2023)

Since being diagnosed with lipedema, Susan has published a book (Jeans on a Beach Day), started her own blog (LegsLikeMine.com, and begun working with a shoe designer in hopes of making comfortable and stylish shoes for other women with the same condition. Neither of us knows how profitable her venture will be, but if you know Susan you know that’s not the point. Money was never the point. All Susan has ever wanted to do, and will continue to do, is make the world a better place. For 28 years she did it for the federal government, and she’ll continue to do it for as long as she can.

In President Biden’s most recent State of the Union address, the president called for the “vast majority” of federal employees to begin transitioning back to the office, citing “significant progress fighting the COVID-19 pandemic has made it safer to do so.” While Biden’s motivation and the current state of COVID may be debatable, what is not debatable is that I fall into the category of “vast majority of federal employees.” Last Wednesday I returned to the office for the first time in approximately two years. Here are a few random pictures and thoughts I had while returning to the office.

I had plenty of time to enjoy the view of some lovely Oklahoma morning clouds as I sat stopped in traffic on I-40. For the past two years my morning commute has consisted of rolling out of bed and walking from our bedroom to my office — average commute time, 45 seconds. Based on the traffic I experienced, it appears federal workers are not the only people on the interstate returning to the office. Rush hour is back, baby. My typical 25-minute drive to work took a little more than twice that amount of time. While sitting on I-40 with a coffee in hand and my car in park, I couldn’t help but think what a waste of time commuting to and from work is. I don’t miss this at all.

Many large corporations, not just the federal government, are touting the upside of returning to work. “I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to being together again,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “I hope everyone is feeling as energized as I am, and that you are looking forward to seeing your colleagues in person again in the weeks ahead,” said Comcast CEO Jeff Shell in a memo to the company’s staff.

At the office, I sit staring at computer monitors inside a cubical located inside a dingy room. I cannot see a window; light comes from rows and rows of florescent lights. At home I have larger monitors, fewer distractions, a large window, and better coffee. My job involves manipulating data that lives on computers I’ve never physically seen. Communication with my coworkers takes place over chat, via email, or through internet-based voice calls. 99.9% of the people I work with live in other states. Nobody I work with can tell, knows, or cares where I am physically located. Like most large organizations We experienced road bumps while transitioning employees to maximum telework in 2020; those issues were ironed out long ago. Everyone in my management chain has been super supportive of telework and I have become accustomed to the convenience and lack of distractions it has provided. For someone with ADD, returning to the workplace and being bombarded by other people’s phone calls and conversations are mentally taxing. My headphones earned their keep Wednesday.

For some reason, everybody returned to work this week except for the cafeteria staff. In lieu of reopening the cafeteria, the campus scheduled food trucks to arrive during lunch. My friends Emily, Johnny and I walked over to the trucks (about a quarter mile) to order lunch. Due to the lines and wait time, we had to take our food back to our desks to eat. My BBQ sandwich, large pickle, and can of Diet Coke was $14.50. Going into the office is expensive.

If there was any highlight to returning to the office at all, it was seeing my friends.

Somewhere between our building and the food trucks my badge fell out of its lanyard. I didn’t notice my badge was missing until I returned to my desk. Without my badge, I cannot log into my computer or even access the door to our office. Johnny and I ended up retracing our steps to the food truck in search of this valuable piece of plastic. For those keeping track that’s 1/4 mile to the food trucks (the first time), 1/4 mile back, and then 1/4 mile each way a second time in search of my badge… which we did not find.

When I returned to my desk I noticed I had a new voice mail. A nice woman named Valerie discovered my badge on the ground while out walking and took it with her back to her building. After making a quick phone call, I set out for another walk. Because of parking lot construction, the walk to Valerie’s building was approximately 1/2 a mile. I excitedly collected my badge and returned to my desk to finally eat my lunch.

At 4pm, building construction begins. The noise is more than distracting; it’s so loud that it’s difficult to hear phone calls. I decided that was a good time to call it a day. On my way out I discovered that the evening construction crew moves quickly, filling the hallway and sidewalk with table saws and other loud tools.

In summary, Wednesday I spent 90 minutes walking to get lunch and track down my badge. The rest of my work day was spent looking at a computer screen, collaborating with people who live hundreds and hundreds of miles away. I looked hard for an upside to returning to the office last week, and other than having lunch with a couple of old friends, had difficulty coming up with anything positive to say. As more people begin to return to the office I suppose things will begin to feel more like the old normal, but I would by lying if I said I didn’t prefer the new normal we’ve come to know over the past two years.

Through what can only be called a comedy of errors, “we” (not me) managed to brick nearly 1,000 laptops at work. The details aren’t particularly important (nor am I in a position to discuss them), but let’s just say that a unique combination of outdated operating systems, older third party disk encryption solutions, and Microsoft’s latest patches combined to create the perfect storm for these specific machines. All of these things came together in a way that left the machines in a non-bootable state, effectively turning them into “bricks.”

A quick response was needed, so management requested that those machines be mailed to Oklahoma City where an impromptu team of approximately thirty computer specialists gathered to remediate the issue. Roughly one third of the team members like myself live here in Oklahoma; the rest have come from Texas to Washington DC to lend a hand. Over the past several days I’ve had the opportunity to catch up with some old friends and make some new ones.

Because of the large scope and quick turnaround of this effort, many kinds of volunteers were needed. We have people receiving and inventorying the machines. We have people dealing with obtaining disk decryption keys. We have people physically swapping hard drives. We have people reimaging machines, performing data recovery, and making sure all the required software has been reinstalled before the laptops are repackaged, tracked, and shipped out. My contribution to the project has largely been in automating some of the processes. I wrote the scripts that automate the backup process, updates the BIOS, and performs other tasks — and when we found that PowerShell couldn’t operate in the environment, I reverted back to ol’ DOS batch files (yes, in 2020). If I had more time I could have written more graceful code, but this is a quick-and-dirty operation, and I wrote some quick-and-dirty scripts to move things along. There have been hiccups along the way, and the scripts are still being tweaked as I get feedback from the technicians about more parts of the process that can be automated.

Beginning last Wednesday, I’ve been working twelve hours a day (as have most of the volunteers). Wednesday morning we had volunteers but no tools, no new hard drives, no USB sticks (needed for imaging) and, most important of all, no donor machines. Looking at a glass half full, that gave us time to create a skeleton process (which to be sure has changed several times as bottlenecks were identified). By Friday, machines were moving through the process as smoothly as could be expected.

Today, Saturday, we’ll be working from nine a.m. until we run out of machines. If we can get the stockpile down to zero today, we’ll get Sunday off and begin again on Monday. Sometime next week, the first wave of traveling volunteers will return to their duty locations and a new wave will arrive. Hopefully there will be enough crossover time for the old group to pass along the process to the incomers. The official ETA for completion is “when all the machines are done,” so we’re hoping within another week or two the mass wave of dead machines will have been processed, and any future machines can be handled by one of our normal imaging teams. Until then, it’s all hands on deck. I’m tired and sore, but also excited and determined.

Last Tuesday Susan and I were able to have dinner with Susan Wood-Butorac, a person who directly changed the course of both of our lives.

In the winter of 1995 I was twenty-two years old. I had been working as a contractor at the FAA for eight months, and had only been married to Susan for four. Beginning that fall, I started travelling all over the country, performing hardware upgrades on workstations and servers. If you really want to date this story, the objective of those trips was to make sure every 386 computer met a “minimum baseline” of 8MB of RAM and a 540 MB hard drive. The RAM and hard drives were so expensive back then that we weren’t even allowed to travel with them; they were shipped directly to the sites we visited, and inventoried both before we arrived and after we left.

For several months, I flew around the country performing these upgrades. I’d be gone for a week and then home for a week or two before heading back out. In just a few months I visited Phoenix, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Boise, none of which I’d visited before. On each trip I stayed in a nice hotel, got a generous per diem, and had access to a rental car. I ate like a king, drank like a fish, and met many people that I am still friends today. Life was good.

Sometime that winter, I visited Spokane, Washington. It was freezing cold, and the roads were covered in ice. On normal trips we traveled in packs of two but on this trip they sent four of us. When we got there, I discovered why. The office had recently expanded, and several of the employees weren’t even connected to the network. That was the trip I learned how to make network cables by hand. I spent a lot of that week climbing ladders and standing on desks, running cable through a drop ceiling — a task made more difficult by the fact that the building was built in the 1920s. Brick and cinder block barriers turned what would have normally been 10′ cable runs into 80′ mazes.

I loved it. I loved the work, the old building (which sat on the edge of a runway), the people who worked in the office, and the town itself. Back then Spokane was only a satellite office, and not fully staffed. When we left, I said (in a typical twenty-two-year-old cocky manner), “whenever you’re ready to hire a computer specialist, give me a call.”

A few months later in the summer of 1996, they did.

It was Susan Wood-Butorac who convinced the manager of the office (Art Jones) to give that goofy kid from Oklahoma a chance. Of course there’s never a guarantee that you’ll get a government job when you apply for it — in fact, the odds are kind of against you — but I went ahead and applied, Susan Wood-Butorac put in a good word for me, and the rest is history.

In September 1996, I packed my Dodge Neon full of computers and CDs and drove the 1,800 miles from El Reno, Oklahoma to Spokane, Washington. I distinctly remember arriving in town the day Weird Al was performing live in Spokane, which according to his website was September 10, 1996. A few months later, my wife also landed a job working at the Spokane Flight Standards District Office (FSDO). The two of us worked there until the spring of 1998, when we decided we’d had enough of being away from friends and family in Oklahoma and returned home. The time we worked in Spokane gave us reinstatement rights, which helped us later get our foot back into the door, eventually leading to the careers we have today.

And so this past week Susan Wood-Butorac was in town, and one night, over Mexican food and drinks, we shared a bunch of fun stories and memories of working in Spokane. Good times, then and now.