Bond
Bond is my boss and mentor; he is the network manager. He aspires to become either James Bond (“After Daniel Craig, they’ll want a more effeminate Bond,” he once told us over Martinis) or Jack Bauer (every IP phone handset in the school has the CTU ringtone as a standard option).
He does not suffer fools gladly (he only half-jokingly models his work style after the Bastard Operator from Hell) and is very good at what he does.
The day he leaves or is hit by a bus, I will likely be gone too, as there’s currently no way I could step into the job he somehow manages to do.
Our Cisco phones received an upgrade recently, reverting all phones back to the default ringtone and removing CTU24 from the options list entirely. I’d mentioned it to our network team, and it was met with a suitably apt shrug. Then the support calls started coming in – it was quickly restored :)
I have a boss like this too – his mastery of hardware, software and programming is unparalleled. I often wonder why he’s working in a company with only £70 million turnover. He made the job liveable – sadly the site’s closed so our professional relationship is soon to end. A very sad time. =(