Day 4.0 - The Grind Behind the Screen – A Day in the Life of IT Ops

Some days in IT are a whirlwind of unexpected outages, broken printers, and "why can't I connect to the Wi-Fi?" phone calls. But then there are grind days—the unsung, under-the-radar kind of days where the real work happens. No fires to put out, no major incidents. Just you, your terminal, a backlog of tickets, and a very full cup of coffee.

Today was one of those days.

8:00 AM – Log in, Lock In

The morning starts like most: a fresh cup of caffeene and a scroll through the ticket queue. The backlog has been creeping up—password resets, printer mappings, software install requests, and the usual “PC feels slow” tickets that no monitoring tool will ever catch in time.

The mission today? Close as many as possible. Headphones on. Time to grind.

9:30 AM – Closing Tickets, One Click at a Time

Working through the list:

• Helped Marketing install Adobe Acrobat Pro.
• Remote desktop into a user’s machine to fix a broken Outlook profile.
• Deployed a missing Windows update to an exec’s laptop (which somehow hadn’t rebooted in 45 days).
• Logged into the print server to fix a queue jam that's been bothering Finance for a week.

None of it glamorous, but all of it necessary.

Pro tip: The faster you can reply with a human-sounding message and a fix, the more love IT gets. Even if it's just for getting their Teams app to stop auto-minimizing.

1:00 PM – System Updates & Patch Patrol

After lunch, it’s time to shift gears. Maintenance window. Servers don’t patch themselves (unless you trust that 2AM auto-scheduler... we don’t).

Manually check that the RDS box got last night's patch. Push updates to a few stubborn endpoints via Intune. Run a quick test on the SharePoint migration staging area—looking solid.

Also, snuck in a firmware update on the switch stack. Nobody noticed. That’s the goal.

2:30 PM – Documentation & Digital Hygiene

No IT day is complete without a bit of cleanup.

• Updated the asset tracker with two new laptops and some new SSD's.
• Documented the weird fix for that VPN client issue (the one that only happens on Dell machines after BIOS updates… yeah, that one).
• Sent a friendly reminder to the team about MFA policy updates next week.

Also deleted three old GPOs from a test OU. Felt risky. Felt good.

4:30 PM – Shutdown Sequence

Ticket queue is lighter. Systems are happy. No calls, no alarms. It’s easy to overlook these days, but they’re the backbone of a healthy IT environment.

Because behind every “everything’s working fine” is a day like today—a quiet grind of updates, fixes, and proactive care. No spotlight. Just steady work from behind the screen.

Tomorrow might bring chaos. But today? We earned the peace.

TL;DR: IT isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s just maintenance, tickets, and caffeine. But those are the days that keep everything running.

-IcePhishHacker