Adam Zangerle is a network engineer in Network and Communication Services in UBIT. A UB employee for 13 years, Zangerle used to work third shift, from midnight to 8 a.m., an experience that he says kind of prepared him for coming to campus during the shutdown.
What’s the hardest thing about working during the shutdown? “We work a lot with coming up with custom solutions and troubleshooting. Not having your co-workers available to kind of bounce things off of, you can get stuck on something. Sometimes just talking over a problem with a co-worker makes you think of it differently. If you explain it to someone, you can almost find the solution just by explaining it. Email isn’t the same; you don’t get their genuine reaction.”
Zangerle was pleased to develop the parking lot Wi-Fi to help students and employees gain remote, safe, wireless access to UB’s servers. “This is for people who don’t have sufficient internet access at home, so they come to the UB parking lots and get the UB connection. We are seeing half a dozen to a dozen people at any time in the parking lots using it for network access.” Parking lot Wi-Fi is accessible in the Greiner and Furnas lots on the North Campus and the Parker lot on South Campus.
What gets him through the day? He says Cisco Jabber helps. “We use it to chat with our co-workers and keep up to date with what we’re doing and to ask questions. A lot of us are also using text messaging to talk over issues and socialize, too.”
“Getting through the week is a constantly evolving situation. No one’s had to deal with this. The last time this happened was 1918, the Spanish flu. My kids ask, ‘when is this going to change?’ As a parent, you have to say ‘I don’t know.’ We’re just rolling with the punches.”