Tag: work

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Fumble

I had to get gas first thing this morning, so I decided to Treat Yo Self to a Wendy’s Maple Bacon Chicken Croissant on the way back to work. It was delicious, if not a bit of a greasy mess. Work was a bit stressful first thing just because teachers are still trickling in, and my math hallway always seems to be super needy. I can’t tell if it’s just because they’re closest to me, or if it’s because they legitimately just have more software needs than other departments.

Ben texted me to say that five of them were going to Linh for lunch, and I didn’t want to miss out on the group meal even though I wasn’t really hungry yet. I just had a couple spring rolls since they were mostly iceberg lettuce anyway. While we were there, I mentioned trying to put things into motion that would get us some attention from the school board. I figured that would help right the ship, but it’s possible I misjudged the point of failure.

After lunch, I tinkered with my flash drives and came to the conclusion that any speed difference beyond the initial copying of data to the drives was negligible. The $10 extra per flash drive ($400 in total) would only really save me about four minutes (half the time) of making and updating each of the drives.

I went by the shop at the end of the day so I could return the one failed drive that I had, and tried to help Ben with an imaging issue on a brand new laptop model. Then I headed to Mark’s office to help a couple of the others there. We got a fair bit fixed in a short amount of time since it was less teaching and more doing, even though I had to tinker with it a bit myself to even figure out what I was doing.

When we finished, I went home for a little bit to wait for Summer to get off work. Then I met her at her house to make up some leftovers for dinner. It felt good to clean up the couple of things we did. While we were there, I got a couple messages about the school board meeting and tried to check out the live stream. Unfortunately there was no way to scrub back in time, so I had to wait for the stream to finish before I could go back and watch it.

Summer and I headed back to my house for the evening, and she settled right into bed. I tinkered online for a bit longer than I should have, but it looks like this captain has some work to do.

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These Aren’t the Laptops You’re Looking For

This morning was rough getting out of bed, and it didn’t get much better into the day. I started out well enough, trying to make sense of everything I have left to do before school starts again. It wasn’t long before Allen and Josh showed up to pick up some laptops. I thought they were there to help take the old devices to UPS for me, but after some forced conversation and a bit of random chance, I discovered they were actually looking for the old teacher devices that we were keeping. I didn’t have very many for them to take since they’re still picking them up in the office, but we loaded up what we could and packed them into Josh’s car.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to get into much else, so I started unboxing more parts so I could find the three LCD screens that required broken parts to be returned. Then I went to the shop and picked up Zach, Allen, and Greg for a trip to Firehouse. They had a bunch more new vegetables to try, so I loaded up my New York Steamer and went to town. It was excellent.

After lunch, I went back to the high school and did my best to keep busy between all the off-contract employees bugging me to fix their issues immediately. I managed to replace a couple docking stations, helped Al type his password in correctly a couple more times, and eventually got around to taking a sample laptop and box of 80 chargers to The UPS Store to get a quote.

I went by the shop on the way back across town, but Ben wasn’t there for a chat and the others were busy imaging and loading iPads into cases. I only had a little bit of time left, so I went back to the high school and tested out my new USB flash drives. So far, the Patriot Supersonic Rage Elite is the fastest, but out of two drives, I’ve already broken one and was unable to format it. I’ll give it another try tomorrow, but I’m starting to run out of options.

I left work a little late and ran home to clean up a bit before going by Mark’s office again. He had a bunch of questions for me, and I grew to hate offline email clients just a little bit more. He hooked me up with the headgear I needed for my CPAP, and it still baffles me that those simple elastic straps sell for $15 when they’re “on sale.”

Summer got home just as we finished up, so I met her at the house and we went to my parents’ for dinner. Mom made some killer bún thang out of the leftover wing tips from Julie’s BBQ Birthday Bash. After dinner, we headed home and settled into bed pretty quickly after I put together my Kobalt string trimmer.

So I know you’re super busy dealing with like three times your usual workload, but can you pay attention to just me right now?

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Shipping and Receiving

Autumn stayed at my house today, but was probably well enough to come work. It was just as well though, because I spent a good portion of the day running all around the place.

Zach, Gary, Allen, Ben, and I all went to Sam’s for lunch, which was just great. It’s a bit expensive, but that’s to be expected. I’ll have to try one of the po’ boys next time, instead of always getting the 3-piece of everything combo.

After lunch, I went by the shop for a little bit, chatted with Ben some more, and then went back to the high school to finish up. All of the old lease stuff is boxed up and ready to ship, but I’ll have to take a sampling of it to the UPS Store to get a quote for shipping. I’ve been getting a ton of parts in lately too, which I’m just stacking up for later. I have a feeling we won’t even use most of it, but it’ll be nice to have just in case. I sort of feel bad for knowing I can get bulk orders of that stuff instead of filing individual claims the way Dale had done for all those years.

When I got home from work, Autumn was in the floor still trying to see how many screens she could get between her face and the wall. I let her continue on watching TV while I went to unwind in some Overwatch. Summer eventually got out of work and headed home, so Autumn and I headed up for the evening.

What if no lives matter?

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Tag and Bag

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.

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Training Costs Extra

Autumn was able to finish imaging the teacher devices this morning, and then got most of my power adapters counted and boxed up for shipment. I arranged for pickup of all the depot claims I had ready to go out, and even helped a couple fussy people with their technology woes.

We took a late lunch at Cici’s, and it seemed like right as we sat down, Autumn started acting like she wasn’t feeling great. She ate a little bit, but wanted to go home for the afternoon, so I dropped her off at her house before going back to work.

Ben came over, and we had another conference call with Impero, which went only slightly better than yesterday. It turns out we’ve got a lot of work to do to get Clever to play nicely with their software, and exactly zero of us has any free time to dedicate to it.

I spent the rest of the afternoon straightening up a bit more before heading home to change, and then off to get Mark and his team switched over to G Suite. It turns out he had already initiated a trial but needed to confirm ownership of the domain, so the affiliate link was out, but the discount code still seemed to work. He kept wanting to do things for himself, which was both endearing and frustrating because I love getting to teach people new things, but it takes significantly longer to get things done because I’ve spent most of my life learning how to do what he’s hired me to do. There’s some combination of feeling like I’m burning time on the clock, and worry that the value of my time is being vastly underestimated. Most of my time was spent waiting for his old Outlook data to export, and we ended up having to put off importing it until the next day.

I headed up to Summer’s to meet them for dinner, where Autumn seemed to be feeling a little worse but still wanted to go back to my house for the evening “because her quilt was there.” I didn’t need an excuse to go back home, so after we ate, the girls started to get cleaned up and I went back home to wait for them.

Just as I got there, Summer called and said Autumn was having leg cramps and feeling extremely sick, so I went back up the hill instead. It seemed to me like another case of bad babysitting because she just simply didn’t take care of her body. It’s one of the most aggravating things to me because I want her to be healthy, but I can’t be bothered to micromanage every ounce of anything going into her body. If she hasn’t learned proper hydration and nutrition by the age of 15, then I don’t have the patience to rein her in now, nor the sympathy to put up with her declining health. I’m certainly not going to give her any attention in the hospital.

Once we got her a regimen of fluids for the evening, Summer and I sat down for an episode of Master of None before stopping to talk about our feelings for a bit. Then it was off to bed.

Yes. Turned out great. This is fine. Everything is fine.

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Bulk Deliveries

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.

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I Can’t Believe, Today Was a Good Day

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.

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Aye Captain

I dropped Autumn off with Summer this morning so she could do something besides sit around the house while I got ready for work. Summer ended up needing the help anyway, so it worked out at the expense of running late myself.

We had our work cut out for us today, to a much greater extent than I expected. I started out having Autumn file warranty claims while I bounced between servicing other devices and troubleshooting my task sequence for faculty devices.

Just before lunch, Zach called and said they were getting kicked out of the kitchen area and the other half of the cafeteria at Gardner, so they had to bring me the rest of my teacher devices. I didn’t really have room for them either, but we did our best to carve out a hole. I still have a bunch of new monitors sitting in the hallway for Ethan’s eight additional lab computers.

Obama’s been gone so long that
America’s all out of change.

As soon as we finished there, we went to Popeye’s to pick up some chicken for lunch. We got to Summer just before a huge storm hit, and we ate with her. Ronda showed up for an oil change on our way out, so we stopped to talk with her a bit, then made it back to the high school. We ran into a shotgun pattern of warranty expiration dates when filing claims, which had me super stressed. In the end, they’re all just extra devices anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s all garbage, and I don’t really care if it fails because I know it’s not any fault of ours.

We worked pretty late, and I still never got a functioning faculty image made, but I think I may have figured out why. I won’t know until I get to try my new media tomorrow morning. It’s Friday though, and everyone has chosen to work at 8am. I took off last Friday, so tomorrow is my first full scheduled eight hour day since before the pandemic started. I’ve actually worked plenty longer than that by choice, but somehow actually being scheduled for it feels worse.

Summer got off early and went to the gym, so Autumn and I ran by the graveyard to quickly check for any treasure. Then we went home so I could quickly change before going to Walmart for dinner supplies. They had a ton of Petit Jean pepper bacon marked down pretty significantly, so of course I bought all of it.

When we got back to their house, Summer and Eaddie were up in arms about all the things Eaddie hadn’t done at home all day. It took us a while to get our rotisserie chicken wraps going because I had to get in Eaddie’s face about it. I couldn’t fathom rebutting not completing any chores because I had nothing to do all day. That was just stupid, and she knew it.

Dinner was great, and at least felt healthy. Autumn went to her room and passed right out, and Eaddie turned her attitude around to get some things done in her room. She even seemed to be in a good mood about it.

I guess sometimes you’ve just gotta take a hollering.

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On the Subject of Taking on Large Projects by Yourself

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.

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Accounted

Autumn came to work with me again today, and we finally got most of the old lease boxed up and ready to ship. I spent most of my time trying to account for every serial number that Lenovo expects to receive back. We did a pretty good job of sorting everything out, but it wasn’t until I got some feedback from the library staff that we really had everything accounted for.

We went to Cici’s for lunch since I had another BOGO. Then we stopped by the shop to catch up a bit. With all the older, purchased devices I’ll be shipping back, I’ll actually be keeping quite a few of the old leased devices as a sly upgrade.

We finished up at the high school and then came back to my house for just a little bit. It was then that I realized the new leaf blower I bought did not use the same battery from my lawn mower like I expected. Failing that, we headed out to pick up Eaddie, then went to my parents’ house for some leftovers.

I got the girls food, then let Autumn swim while I finished up some super-veggie spring rolls. They were basically the plant version of sausage in a casing. Fiber for days.

On the way back home, we stopped to get Summer some food from Tropical Smoothie since she had a long day, and I watched a couple episodes of The Punisher with Eaddie before bed.

Well that blows.