Tag: work

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More Phones, More Problems

I went to the high school again first thing this morning and did a bit of work while just generally being available for Mike to ask questions. It wasn’t long though, before I got an urgent work order from the junior high regarding some trouble in their cafeteria. I headed across town and got them going pretty easily, and even got a cookie for my troubles.

The library seemed a little terse today with their new duties, and I don’t really know what they have to be upset about. I guess it’s just resistance to change, which is common anyway. I went to lunch pretty late since I was on a roll on closing out work orders. I just grabbed a free Whopper and some onion rings, then ate at home.

I went back to the high school for a little while after lunch, but then had to meet Kyle and Greg for a touch panel swap at Sequoyah. Gary had already helped Kyle load up the truck by the time I got there, so we just met Greg at the school as the buses were loading. The SMART E70 came down without too much trouble, and it was about the best time I’ve ever had removing one.

The girls were staying in, so I left work a little late after chatting with Ben for a little while, then went to my parents’ house for dinner. I needed to pick up some batteries for my Nerf gun, so I went to Walmart and wandered through the aisles for a little while before coming home for the evening.

Summer’s phone died on her earlier in the day, so she had to file a warranty claim. My new Galaxy S21 Ultra was supposed to be here tomorrow, but now the shipping information says it’s delayed without any additional information. Hopefully it arrives early next week so I can get it set up in time for the trip.

Okay, so what do you need.. besides a miracle?
Nerf. Lots of Nerf.

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Imperotive

It felt super cold today from how wet it’s been. I went to the high school first thing, and sat in with Mike all day. I tried to just be there so he could ask his questions, and guide him on a few work orders. He’s still having trouble keeping on task and closing out some of the simpler ones, so hopefully we can break him out of that before the start of school when it becomes much more overwhelming.

Lunch came around pretty quickly, and I picked up some Arby’s and surprised Summer at work. After we ate, I went to the shop and ended staying there the rest of the day, poking at Impero and contacting support so we can spin up another server to support all of the client connections we have.

The girls went to dinner with their father, so I went home and waited for Summer to get off work. She ended up just going home afterward anyway, which was a better choice all around anyway. Becky came by and dropped off a tiny painting she made me for Christmas, and we chatted for a little bit before I went to my parents’ house for dinner. Then it was back home for a cold, quiet evening.

Peek-a-moo!

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Adminton

Summer had to leave for Little Rock early this morning, so I took the kids to school. This time we even made it on time! I stuck around the junior high all morning since there were plenty of tickets for me to close. That office still doesn’t feel like mine, and it’s definitely not as useful. I’ll have to rearrange to make sense of all the crap that’s in there now.

Melinda wanted to go to lunch, so Josh suggested Morelos. Once we all agreed, she mentioned wanting pizza, so we went to Brick Oven instead. The service was actually pretty quick today, so we made it back relatively close to time. Then I tinkered in the shop until Ben sent me back to the junior high to meet with Matt, Janie, and Kelsey about their 1:1 device policies and procedures.

It took a little while, but eventually he understood what I was trying to explain, and I think tensions dropped a lot as we finished because he realized we weren’t hurting as badly for devices as everyone originally thought. Ultimately what I learned was that things are dumb because nobody wants to think through the policy and then enforce it until everything goes to hell, and then everyone just individually comes up with something that works until someone else tells them otherwise. If we had just assumed control of the project, I think things would have worked out better, and I doubt anyone would have bucked.

Eaddie had her flute lesson, so I dropped her off and got Autumn. Then they wanted to go on to karate early, so I dropped them off and went to my parents’ house to drop off the Fiero title. I wasn’t really hungry after the big lunch, but I ended up having a little bowl of curry before heading home to clean up.

The girls stopped by on the way home since Autumn failed to pack everything she deemed necessary, and then I continued to clean up clutter around the kitchen. It’s been slow progress as usual, but still working in the right direction.

Be gone, sticky mug!

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You Too Shall Pass

We got a bit of a downpour last night, with lightning, thunder, and the works. My power went out just long enough to turn all the living room lights on, and evidently something happened to at least one of the stoplights on the way to work, because it defaulted to either flashing yellow or red. I started the day off at the shop and quickly got pulled into looking at other peoples’ problems. We just have too many freshies and not enough support for them. They’ll be great if they stick around a while, but it’s too tempting to go somewhere that pays better for similar work.

Gary, Zach, and Greg wanted to go to Linhs for lunch. The food was great, but the service has been severely lacking lately, for similar reasons. I think I’ve seen new servers working every time I come in, and everyone she hires seems very green. It took us an hour and a half to get out of there, but nobody complained.

I spent the afternoon with Mike at the high school, and tried to show him a few other things. I’m sure he’s capable, but he really is kind of all over the place. I imagine he’s acting exactly like I did when I started, which is understandable. Working for the school is a whole different kind of beast. We left later than we should have to get a TV to mount downstairs. Of course we had to mount a plywood board first, since it was a drywall installation. We actually made pretty good time for it just being the two of us, but we didn’t get any of the new cabling run. We also forgot to remove the black tag from the box before we threw it in the dumpster.

As soon as we got back to the shop, I hopped in the car and went to pick up the girls that were still at the high school, and took them to my parents’ for dinner. We just had some quick leftovers before I had to get Autumn back to the high school for Monday night class. She failed her biology class, so for the next seven weeks she’s going to be eating up an hour and a half of our time every Monday evening.

I decided to treat Eaddie to some ice cream at Bocadillos since she passed all of her classes, and I guess that’s the bar we had inadvertently set. Then we went back to my house for a little while since we had more time to kill. When we got back to the high school, I ran back to the dumpster to retrieve the black tag we threw away, and then we waited for Autumn to make her way through a big crowd of students as they left for the evening.

Summer is leaving me on kid duty tomorrow morning since she has to drive to Little Rock, so I took the girls home to clean up, and then we all came back to my house for the evening. Hopefully tomorrow I can close out some of my own tickets.

Much disappoint.

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No Egg Omelette

We were down to four plus the boss today, so it was a quiet and slow start. I convinced Zach to sign up for Robinhood, and I placed some buy orders for myself. Then we split up into a couple groups to run down some tickets at neglected campuses. Josh and I went to Crawford to retrieve a cart as well, which got us just into lunch, so we took Zach with us to meet Ben and Kyle at CJ’s.

After lunch, I helped Zach swap a television, which should have been a 15 minute job, but turned into a two hour job after we hung one new TV that was damaged out of the box, and then had to re-run an HDMI cable because the new model TVs didn’t have VGA inputs.

Ben let us go early, but Zach and I ended up sticking around most of that time to chat with Ben. When I did leave, I just waited at the house for the girls to come over, and then we went to my parents’ house for dinner. Mom made bánh xèo and warmed up some leftover curry, and we sat and chatted a while.

When we finally made it back home, the two seasons went straight to bed while Eaddie and I watched the next episode of WandaVision. I really liked the progression, and I think Summer might like it too, so we’ll probably end up rewatching it soon. Then we watched a couple episodes of House before bed.

An alarm on Saturday morning? Sounds reasonable.

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B-

I got up this morning and cleaned up some old frozen French toast sticks the kids refused to eat themselves. Then I tried going through some more practice tests before it was time to check in for my A+ exam. I didn’t really get as much cramming done as I had hoped, but the first test was more or less a breeze. I felt pretty confident about most of my answers and ended up passing with what I’m guessing was a mid 90%.

My second exam was scheduled a little later so I had time for a shower and a little more studying. Then literally moments before I had to check in for the test, Summer said she was bringing Autumn home to shower because she suddenly couldn’t withstand her scented body wash. I told her that they would have to be completely silent and not come anywhere near me, so one could imagine my rage when Autumn started blaring music in the shower.

I had already started my exam and couldn’t back out or do anything to signal to her to turn the music down. So for half an hour, or an entire third of my allotted exam time, I shook with absolute rage that I couldn’t even read the questions in front of me. The exam was a big deal that I had put off for four years. I specifically scheduled a time when no one would be home, and when that didn’t pan out, it was a simple request for silence. I thought I had absolutely, without any doubt, completely bombed the test. My stomach was in knots for the entire 90 minutes, and when I read that I had passed, I was absolutely astounded. Of course when I confronted Autumn, the only response I got through her door was that “it wasn’t that loud.” I was just glad it was over and that I had another hour pass since my hottest moments.

Hungry and relieved, I re-prepared some awful hamburger meat that Autumn cooked a week ago. It only needed an intelligent touch of seasoning to be great enough for Eaddie and me to eat for dinner, but the star chef just couldn’t crack the code and left it to rot in the fridge.

Summer took Autumn to therapy and I took Eaddie home with me so I could pick up my contacts for real. Then we watched an episode of House until it was time to get Autumn and drop them off at karate. I waited for them at my parents’ house, where I finished setting up their new Chromecast with Google TV. I didn’t have long before I had to get the girls, and we got home just in time to realize Eaddie had forgotten her phone at the dojo. Summer eventually got home, and everyone was pretty quick to wind down from there.

If you’re not going to be prideworthy, at least be respectful and considerate.

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Cram Session

I went to the high school this morning and helped Mike run around campus and close some work orders. Some of the stuff he knows is maddeningly inconsistent with the stuff that he does know, but I suppose that’s to be expected when specializing in a particular field. I’ve just never seen it with someone that’s into technology.

It was Ben’s birthday, so I met everyone back at the shop for lunch. He wanted Linh’s, but they were closed and we ended up at Fat Daddy’s downtown. They seemed slow but asked if we had a reservation for some reason. The food took a while to come out and was predictably dry, but maybe I’m just spoiled now. I should have gotten chicken or steak.

After lunch, I went to the junior high and tried to be useful for a little while. I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but my mind was on my A+ exam and all the anxiety I’ve had about taking that tomorrow.

Eaddie wanted to ride the bus to the high school, so I just picked both of the girls up from there after work. We went to my house so I could gather up some things, then met Summer at home for a quick dinner before everyone pretty quickly filtered off to bed. I stayed up trying to cram some more for my exams, but truthfully I was just too exhausted to retain much. There’s no practical reason for me to remember all of the unused acronyms or port numbers, so hopefully there’s just not much of that on the test.

Testing is dumb.

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Brain Dump

This morning started out pretty slow, but I eventually got to be pretty productive. I worked in the shop all morning, then went to Linh’s with Greg for lunch. Apparently we’re on the fence about an interviewee, so the tenured had a lunch date with him to see if we’d all mesh. Spoiler alert: We won’t. At least not at first. It is tried and true that everyone always hates on the new guy at first, no matter how seasoned.

I spent the afternoon at the junior high, fighting off a bit of anxiety and killing time until school let out by working on some laptops. When Eaddie got out, I took her to her flute lesson – twice because she forgot her flute in my office the first time. Then I picked up Autumn and took her to the shop for a few minutes until quitting time.

We retrieved Eaddie, then went to pick up my contacts from the eye clinic. They wanted to charge me $188 for two boxes after insurance. The first and only contacts I’ve ever purchased in my life were purchased from Contacts1st.com without any insurance for $148 for FOUR boxes, and that included $10 for shipping. Now I get to call “the girl that does the insurance” tomorrow for an explanation and/or correction.

I dropped the girls off with Summer at her shop since none of them cared to go to karate. Then I stopped by the house just momentarily before remembering I could get a free scarf from T-Mobile. I picked that up, then stopped by Zaxby’s for a quick bite before going home to binge on A+ practice exams. I felt pretty good about my test results, but then I read about something called “performance based questions” that got me scared.

At least it’s scheduled, and not a moment too soon.

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Router? I hardly know her!

Most everyone was off for the holiday today. We weren’t, because of course we had to be there. Why wouldn’t we? I spent all morning at the shop setting up a new virtual machine for another Impero server. That should make us at least a little bit future-proof.

Lunch couldn’t come early enough, and Josh, Kyle, Ben, and I went to Stoby’s as an act of rebellion against Zach and Greg wanting to go out of town for Fat Daddy’s. I’d be fine never eating there ever again. It’s not bad. It’s just not worth driving out of town when the one in town has a bigger menu.

After lunch, I spent a couple hours at the junior high. Most of that time was eaten up when I had to assemble Bri’s new dual monitor stand setup. What made that so ridiculous was the fact that she has a desktop with dual monitors about six feet away. That class budget is just too damn high, so she’s left buying useless or redundant crap just to spend it all. I don’t even know how many lamps she had in that room.

I ended the day at the high school just for a little while to try and resolve an issue in one of my labs. Then I headed home for the evening. I originally thought I’d be heading up to Summer’s for the evening, but I lost track of time while picking and cleaning. She didn’t really have any plans anyway, so I just stayed in and cleaned up the leftover salad for dinner.

Between bouncing around from room to room, I occasionally stopped at the computer and discovered some weirdness going on with my router and internet. I tried repeatedly to update the firmware, to no avail. It was pretty frustrating, but I continued to juggle that along with all the cleaning and organizing until bedtime.

Well it looks different to me.

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Stick to your Ribs

I had to get up a little early this morning to run across town and do some work for Mark. Summer took Autumn home while Eaddie stayed here and had a video conference for band. Eventually they all went home to clean up before Summer took them to stay the night with their father.

When I finished up with Mark, I ran across the street and chatted with Robert for a little bit. I picked up a rack of ribs and a giant beef rib that I let get mostly cold while I sat and waited between customers to get some time to catch up.

We got back to the house around the same time and ate some ribs. Then we spent the rest of the night finishing up the second season of Cobra Kai. I’m anxious to see where they go from here.

Strike hard.