“Broke Neck Zombies”

In the film”Minority Report” Tom Cruise’s character comes upon a blind drug dealer that gave him some advice. “In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king”. His is how I feel sometimes. When I go to class everyone is looking down feverishly texting or scrolling. They look up for just a second to as  a guide of where they are walking. No one is smiling or have personal conversations. Zombies, broke neck zombies wandering around campus.

I wonder do they ever see the beauty of their surroundings. I go to the downtown campus. It is truly beautiful the scenic scenes of a university with the metropolitan sprawl in the background. I take a look down 3^Rd Street and see the high rises and the urban landscape and think “wow” this is the best school ever. I have been to other colleges. I have been to the University of Virginia, Norfolk State, Old Dominion, Hampton University and Grand Canyon university. All of them have their beauty, but Arizona State is the best. These kids will never see the beauty in their school trying to live 160 characters at a time.

Career Services

I was not able to make to a career services event yet but I went to the site and it is really set up for students. They have a lot of good things on there. The first page draws you in. It had the students graduating and it has another pic of a young lady shaking a man’s hand at a job fair. They have a tabs for students, employer, alumni, faculty& staff and even families.  On the front page you can drop you resume. I thought this was cool.

On the student page they have a list of career fairs and events. They have events most of the events are in the morning which doesn’t help if you have a full time job. They have events several times a week. I will try to make of these events before this class is over and report on it

What a Day

My day begins at 3:25am with my alarm going off on my phone. I roll over and hit the snooze. After hitting snooze again I wake and hop in the shower. I get dressed and take my “stay right “pills which consist of multi vitamin, fish oil pill and two vitamin D pills. I then sit down to watch some news whatever I can catch. I leave my house and asses the weather. Once I have done whether I need a coat or not I hop in my car and I’m off to work.

When im at work I don’t really take breaks but when I do, I “brake” I get away from my work area and sometimes outside the building to take in some fresh air. I do my work day and leave I don’t hang around to “chit chat”. I go home and workout, then I sneak peek at my assignments due. I hop back in my car and go pick my daughter up from school. I help my daughter with her homework. I cook dinner for her and my wife. My wife comes home about 5:30pm. We eat dinner and watch some T.V. while doing homework. Then I talk to my wife about the day’s events and I lie down and watch T.V. until I am ready for bed. I turn out the lights and go to bed.

Just Another Day

My day shift starts at 5:00am. I login to my computer and I log in to the ATS ticket software and email. I look for any high priority tickets and emails. If I don’t find any I start processing tickets by our standard, which 10/30. This method has us answering a ticket or email in 10 minutes and has it assigned in 30 minutes. We also do “FIFO” which is first in first out. At my job we also answer the phones. When someone calls in we get their first and last name or username to assess if they are a client or user. We trouble shoot their issue and keep track of all we are doing in our ticketing system. Our troubleshooting is based on contract we have with the client. Some clients have contracts that we can install and make changes to the computer.

We also have a departmental task that we have to work on. These entire tasks are to make our department more efficient. 4DX (4 Disciplines of Execution) this is how we keep track of our task and we have a meeting every week about them. When we have spare time this is what we work on. This is a regular day at the office for me at American Traffic Solutions.

Balance

When you set out to do something or you set your sights on a goal you go for it. In the pursuit of your goal you have to balance that the life in which you and with the goals you are trying to achieve. This most cases it is easy, especially with young people. Young adults have a very easy time in pursuit of their goals.

What is the balance many people here and wonder what it is? Balance is the action of trying to meet one’s or things needs and accomplishing tasks. This can be construed as easy, but when you have a house, wife, kids and house. When you throw in a full schedule with school this can get daunting to meet all these deadlines and have the task done.

Many people do not prioritize their day. In order to accomplish tasks and get to do things you want to, you have scheduled and priorities. This helps you stay on course throughout the day. People can easily lose focus or be swayed away from what they need to do every. Controlling the balance can be made a little bit easier mapping out your day and prioritizing your day.

Struggle

I have often worked the day or middle shift since I have been working. The day shift is 9am to 5pm. The middle shift is 12pm to 9pm. These shifts fit my “night owl” personality. I have recently changed shifts to a morning shift.

 This shift is 5am to 2pm. This shift is a different one than what I am used to. The morning shift is more flexible with the rest of my day. I have more time to get homework done and pick up my daughter from school. I can make doctors appointments. The downside is I can be up late. I was used to going to bed about midnight or so and still be able to get six to seven hours of sleep. Now I have to go to sleep by 8:30 or 9 at night. This is a struggle for me because I feel now that there is not enough time in the day. There are days that I have to miss things like working out or just having time for myself.

American Traffic Solutions

I am interning for American Traffic Solutions. They are a red light company. They install and maintain sensors that are triggered by speed, red lights or bus lane. They have cameras in Chicago, Texas, Florida, Washington, California and Canada. We also process the violations for some cities and print out the notices and send them to the violators.

American Traffic Solutions work with courts and police departments also with the distribution of our own software. We maintain, develop, and troubleshoot our own program. This program is called Axsis this software takes the images from the camera and puts it into our program so that it can be processed. “Violation Processors” then check the violations to see if it is an actual violation based on federal and state laws. Once that is done it is either sent to the police station So that a police officer can sign off on it or be sent to our printing facility so that a notice of the violation can be sent off. We have offices in New York and Chicago. Our headquarters are here in Tempe, AZ.
What I will be doing for them is doing troubleshooting of our software for clients of courts and police departments. I will doing this in compliance with the contract guidelines set by the client. I will also help load software for the cameras.