TCNZA

If you thought that RGTS was a mouthful and it was hard to remember to call my old company “Rockefeller Group Telecommunications” instead of the more sensible “Rockefeller Telecommunications Group”, TCNZA is even more confusing. TCNZA stands for Telecomm New Zealand Australia. I haven’t pointed out to anyone that Telecomm is one word and not Tele Comm. And I won’t even get into the “New Zealand Australia” part. I think I’d like to add some more countries to the list. Let’s have a company called “Giletti Sydney Rome San Francisco”.

Generally I just say that I work for Telecomm New Zealand. People know right away that it is a telecommunications for that does most of its work in NZ. The Australia but is a consulting firm based in Australia and has mainly one client, a bank. This client provides about 90% of the work and the income so you can imagine what would happen if that one client were to change providers!

The firm has about 150 people, just like RGTS; provides telephone PBX (or PABX as they call it here) services, just like RGTS; does data network development, just like RGTS. There is a sister company called AAPT (Australian Association of Perverse Telecommunications?) which provides internet services predominantly to the home market; there is a network operations center (called the “customer care center” or the CCC) to handle all of the day-to-day customer needs. To RGTS employees this all sounds like a copy of RGTS.

Everyone in the office, with the exception of the executives, has a cubicle. The cubicles have partition walls that are so low that you can see your neighbors if you sit up straight. The person I can see the best is my boss who also has a cubicle and is immediately next to mine. Fortunately we both have terrible posture. The positioning of my computer is such that everyone walking down the hallway can see exactly what I am doing and there is no way to modify the desk or computer location to change that. As a result I rarely check my mail during the day; I save it for when I am home in the morning or for the evening when I get home.

So what is the good news? I don’t have to be on call. I was interviewing for another job at the same time that seemed perfectly fine except that there would be a one-week on call rotation every month. Having done on-call before, I was not at all interested in having to do on-call again. The other plus is that once again I am in a position of making money for the company I work for, as opposed to many IT jobs in which your job is solely something that costs the company money.

My job is as a network architect, which means I do network design and implementation. When I say I’m a network architect I think of George Costanza on Seinfield saying “I always wanted to be an architect.”

Funny parallels with RGTS (only those who have worked at RGTS will find these funny):

- TCNZA is phasing out their old ticketing system called “CAMS” and replacing it with PeopleSoft

- The carpet tiles in the hallway are identical to the ones in RGTS

- TCNZA’s coffee is even worse than that at RGTS: it’s instant!

- Data Engineering consists of about 12 people; voice engineering is one guy

Last revised: February 2004