You’ve all heard how great it is to work for an innovative and cutting edge company from other staff, so I won’t bore you with things you already know. Let’s talk SL culture a bit; let’s get into the real “meat” of what motivates and fuels the staff on a day to day basis—the Dallas NOC staff specifically. It’s a bunch of dudes and me, the only chick. Yes, I am brave… very, very brave!

We like to eat, if you didn’t already know. Our own CTO, Sam Fleitman, actually competes in BBQ contests. We are his sponsor; go 3 Bars BBQ (best ribs you will ever eat)! Work hard, play harder, eat like pigs (and eat pigs too, we love bacon), that’s what we know and love! On this particular day, I decided to go pick up Chipotle for anyone who wanted some. Chris “Mank” Menard was goofin’ on William “Blue” Spencer; and, somehow it was decided that if Blue could eat 3 Chipotle burrito’s in under an hour, we’d all chip in and pay for his lunch. Blue can be somewhat of a braggart, so everyone was into it. Little did we know…

He began on his first one, polishing the puppy off in around 3 minutes flat.

Let me be sure you understand and know the Chipotle burrito. These things are packed full: meat, rice, beans, cheese, sour cream, salsa, lettuce; they are a good 1-2 pounds each I’d imagine.

He starts the second one, and this is where we all think he’s going to slow down. That first one was a breeze, but the rice should start to expand in his stomach within no time. Wrong again, this one went down just as easily, but he decided to take a bit more time. This one clocked in at 3 minutes, 30 seconds. Although he was admittedly full, as you can see from his expression, he forged on…

Blue took a brief break, to let it all settle in before the 3rd and final burrito, but only to have some Mt. Dew and mess with our minds. We knew we’d be buying those burritos, especially when he decided to toy with all of us with this pose. Yes folks, that is the 3rd one, almost gone.

The 3rd was downed in about 4 minutes 15 seconds and that was only because he was having too much fun messing around with us, as we stood on the other side of the table in amazement, horror, and total disbelief. The guy is an eating machine!
We even got our next order free, thanks to the Manager at Chipotle (around $150). When I picked up the order, she asked why there were 3 for Blue, I explained the situation; she loved it and told me that if he did it, to give her a call and the next lunch order was on her! So, I kindly gave her a ring; and, the following week, we got lunch paid for completely!

Thanks for entertaining us Blue! What’s next? It’s been long enough…Hopefully you will be reading another blog soon, with another meat-tastic challenge!

Before coming to SoftLayer in February of 2007, I worked for a large format printing company. What does that mean you ask? We printed LARGE signage, not as large as billboards, but think about a mall and all the signs in the windows and inside the stores, this is called POP (point of purchase) and that’s what I did. I was in charge of making sure schedules were met, materials were ordered (all of them, for the entire company), maintained vendor relations (so I could get what I wanted, when I wanted it) and helped start up their online ordering system, those were a few of my jobs.

I’ve been helping out the inventory team in the Dallas DC as we are getting rid of the old and bringing in the new so to speak, saying bye-bye to the legacy servers that use up too much space and too much power. Our COO asked me for my help, knowing I had an inventory background. I had also worked with one of the inventory guys at my last location. He worked in the shipping/fulfillment department, so he was always aware of inventory levels and things like that, and was responsible for letting me know when we needed more of a particular item in his department (he always did an excellent job).

Yesterday I was putting legacy servers back to a basic config and he was scanning all parts back into the portal and back out based on the basic config. I was amazed at the system. I knew our portal for our customers was amazing, but hadn’t really delved into the inventory side of our reporting, etc. until then. We know where every single piece of hardware is in each of our facilities at any given time. Each stick of RAM, each HDD, each RAID card and the list goes on and on and on. It’s simply amazing. I joked with him saying “our old bosses would freak out if they had a real inventory set up like this, wouldn’t they?” he laughed and agreed.

I had to constantly order things last minute and over night, rush delivery because inevitably, someone would not tell me they took the last roll of vinyl, the last pallet of 20” x 40” boxes, whatever it was, it happened all the time. Taking on so many hats at my last job, I didn’t have time to readily go around and check stock all the time, I relied on each department to tell me and inevitably, it failed over and over again. I had complained for years that people could just walk off with whatever they wanted, as there was no sort of tracking system in place at all. Sure, each thing had its place, but an actual inventory count at the end of each month, reports? HAHAHAHAHA.

SoftLayer not only helps our customers every single day but they also built a system so that it would make their employees lives much easier as well. Every single aspect of this business was painstakingly thought out with the amazing team of guys and gals we have here. If a report doesn’t exist, they can make it happen, sometimes in a day, sometimes it’s not so easy, but they can do it. These guys are super heroes; I’ll let them tell you what kind of super powers they have.