Karen came and worked in my office today to get all the teacher laptops tagged with barcodes. I pushed around a few more chargers, boxed up some more old laptops, and played the shell game in my head all day long. I felt more scattered than usual, and I felt like it was because I was just tired from all the work lately.

Lessons for the day were pretty good, though. Stale donuts in the toaster oven make for caramelized deliciousness. Always discuss your value up front. It doesn’t matter how loud your speakers are, because Karen is louder.

I worked through lunch but still left just a little bit late. When I got home, Dad was there checking out the siding job on the house. It looks awesome. I had no idea they were doing doorframes, otherwise I would have discussed relocating my doorbell before they cut a hole in the siding where the button currently exists.

I was just in and then back out because I had to do some more work with pain-in-the-ass Outlook email files for Mark. It’s funny, because we discussed his aggravation with people in government (and elsewhere) doing things the old way just because that’s how they’ve always been done. I’ll say it any day of the week. POP and IMAP mail are dinosaurs that need to go away forever for most people. Unless you’re so serious about privacy and security that you’re running your own mail server, just be done with that garbage and quit carrying around your old 30 gigabyte archive of email from 20 years ago. There are more than enough companies that will do that shit for you.

Once I stalled out there waiting for more mail imports to finish, I headed to the shop to get some paperwork. Unfortunately I didn’t have my badge, and the app didn’t work, so I couldn’t get in. Ironically, the door was actually left ajar, but I accidentally shut it all the way when I felt for a draft coming out through the crack.

From there, I ran home to troubleshoot why my doorbell and other connected devices weren’t talking. I think the siding folks had Suddenlink come out and recable some things where the line came into the house from the pole, and my modem and/or router just couldn’t recover from it for some reason. I had to reboot both to get it going again, but at least it came back up.

From there, I went to Summer’s for the evening and had some leftovers for dinner. That’s when the girls decided we had to come back to my house for Autumn’s meds, so we just stayed at my house for the night. I went up the ladder to change the bulb in my outside driveway light, and discovered it was only not working because the bulb was loose. I guess that’s my win for the day.

Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

Autumn came to work with me this morning and started imaging the teacher devices. She kept running into problems with some of them, and I probably remade about half of the flash drives over the course of the day. I couldn’t tell if it was an issue with the drives, the laptops, drivers, or something else entirely. I ultimately sent a request for a couple more brands of flash drives to try, and hopefully one of them is the key to our 1,250 laptop imaging nightmare week.

In the middle of all the imaging, Todd came by my office to let me know that I had received a whole ton of empty-feeling boxes from FedEx. It was, in fact, a whole bunch of small parts, and another bunch of depot kits for warranty service.

We ran by Arby’s for a late lunch and brought it back to the shop. Then Ben came by for a conference call with Impero to get our server set up. We had trouble from the very start just receiving the phone call. Then we had trouble with the remote desktop session. Just as we got things rolling, we realized our server didn’t have the required .NET framework installed, so I had to take a moment to get that done even after we received a list of minimum requirements last week. Overall I just felt a little silly for having to schedule a second call the next day since we ran out of time.

After work, I dropped Autumn off at my house and went to visit with Mark again about his potential switch to G Suite. That was where I discovered an apparent loophole in Google cloud storage. Evidently there’s not really a storage limit for Shared Drives, so people with G Suite accounts are selling invites to Shared Drives, and then removing themselves as members so the buyer can be the sole manager of the drive with near-unlimited storage.

Once we settled on the jump to G Suite, I headed home to wait for Summer to get off work. Then the three of us went up to their house for dinner and so they could get cleaned up for the evening. I went outside to clean up around the little pecan trees I planted, and realized one of her trees out back is a persimmon tree. It had been dropping small, hard fruit that I had never noticed before.

When we got back to my house, the girls watched TV while I filled up my old 35-gallon tank as a dumping ground for excess aquarium plants. Afterward I discovered a farm of gnats in the cat box and cleaned that out as well. The cat ate most of my avocado leaves again, and I’m about ready to murder him. I’ll save that for another day.

Maybe it’s time to think about a Galloping Company again.

Zach wanted everyone to come to the shop at 8 this morning, and Autumn and I pulled up just in time to see the recyclers picking up junk from the graveyard. I guess they did have a little meeting inside, but Ben was outside helping clear out the warehouse. Everyone split pretty quick, so Autumn and I just headed on to the high school for the day.

I didn’t really get very far with my task sequence in the morning, but I did discover a way to create batches of warranty claims using a CSV template. That turned a 14+ hour job into just a few minutes after the couple hours figuring out the poorly documented process.

We went to Burger King and got a huge family pack so we could take Summer some food. She had already bought food for the shop, but ate a bit with us anyway.

The afternoon was ripe with success. Autumn verified the warranty status on a ton of serial numbers for me, then unboxed almost all of the teacher devices. I got the self maintainer claims filed for replacement parts, and found the rogue opening bracket that was breaking my task sequence all along. I ended the day duplicating flash drives for a quick jump into imaging next week.

When we got home, I checked out the first day’s worth of siding work on the house. The soffit was done almost all the way around the house, and they were bringing it horizontally from the edge of the roof to the house instead of sloping upward with an overhang. It made me a little worried about having space for creatures to crawl into, but I guess once it’s sealed off it shouldn’t be too much trouble.

Autumn and I waited there until Summer got off work, then we met her at Shell to use my 30¢ per gallon discount. She took Autumn from there, but we both just headed straight to their house for the evening. Autumn and I picked at leftovers, Summer and Eaddie mowed the back yard, and then we put on Who Framed Roger Rabbit because Autumn had never seen it before. Everyone was pretty tired, so it was a relatively early night.

Autumn didn’t want to go to work with me today, but said she would help after lunch if I came to get her. I had all morning to myself to do some more device shuffling, and start getting together claim information for the devices I couldn’t fix in-house.

Just before lunch time, Autumn texted me and said she just wanted to stay home all day, so I wouldn’t have her in the afternoon either. Zach let me know when my 120 teacher laptops arrived, and they already had them loaded into the Gardner kitchen by the time I got there. Everyone else was busy, and also using the trucks and trailer, so I just loaded 30 laptops into my trunk and delivered them to the high school myself.

Ben showed up just as I was getting a cart to retrieve them from my car, so he helped me unload. Then we chatted with Karen for a tiny bit before I went in to try imaging one of the new devices. It was then that I realized I would have to do a bit more work on my task sequence to make it work with the teacher laptops. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get that working, but it won’t be until tomorrow that I have a flash drive ready to test again.

I went home to change after work, then went to meet Beth and Mark at their shop to do some technology consulting. He was finishing up with a customer, so I had to wait a bit, and then things went very differently than I expected. He sat down and started chatting about school district stuff with me, and I just started vomiting grievances. I figure this will end one of two ways. I’ll either be let go for not drinking the Kool-Aid, or be inducted into some dark society whose sole mission is to root out the corruption in our local government. Either way it should be a lot of fun.

Moving on from that, we chatted at length about choices in email hosting for a business domain, and I was left mostly confused about why any of this was happening. He seemed anxious to pay me though, if I only had the mental capacity to conjure up some fair billing practice.

By the time I got up to Summer’s, the girls had already eaten the homemade Hamburger Helper that Autumn made for dinner. I warmed up some for myself, and then watched the last episode of The Punisher with Eaddie. The evening went by frustratingly quickly, and all I have to look forward to is more laptops in the morning.

Don’t go and try making sense of it. You’ll go positively mad.