Tag: work

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Work Permitted

Autumn and I got up to go to work this morning, and did our best to find a groove. She started imaging student laptops while I put out a few fires. There was a power transformer issue over the weekend that left our main switch closet downstairs without power, but that was an easy fix by the time I got there. Kayla was in and out to bring me returned teacher laptops.

We met at the shop for lunch, and went with Zach and Greg to Las Palmas to eat. Afterward, we stopped by central office so Autumn could sign her tax paperwork, but Cindy had just stepped out for lunch. Instead, we shipped back off to high school to accomplish as much as we could. Autumn replaced a couple laptop LCD panels, which I thought was a good break from imaging laptops, and wasn’t as scary for her as it might have seemed without any prior experience.

Kyle was supposed to come by to help, but only showed up just as Autumn and I were leaving for her physical therapy appointment. It was nice to be able to give a quick 20-second rundown of how to image devices and then leave without having to explain things in more detail. I dropped Autumn off and went back to the shop to get Autumn’s paperwork, but she’ll still have to sign it in the morning.

I went back to the high school so Kyle wouldn’t be sitting there without any other direction, but we didn’t have long left in the day. He took off shortly after quitting time, and I wasn’t terribly far behind. I ran home to change, then met up with Mark again to take care of a few issues they had uncovered.

We finished up right about the time that Summer and the girls were done, so I met them at my parents’ house for bún thang. Summer was pretty bad off with nerve pain again, so we didn’t stick around terribly long. I stayed to chat for just a little longer, then met the girls at their house for the evening.

Time to over-analyze for maximum-output decision making.

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Is This What White People Sound Like?

I went to the shop first thing this morning to try and recruit some help moving all of the old laptops from my office to The UPS Store. Josh and Kyle drew the short straws, so I got the truck and we headed out. We managed to get it all into the back of the truck, except for a half box of laptops that we forgot to grab.

Once that was done, I dropped Josh and the truck off, and then Kyle and I went back to the high school to replace some docking stations. It got me a little out of my groove I was in, but we got a lot accomplished and I appreciated the help. He was only working the half day, so he cut out at lunch and I went back to my office for the afternoon.

I still had a leftover sandwich in the fridge, so I ate that while I worked. All of my flash drives accepted the new laptop image, so hopefully I can start on that next week. I got a couple huge boxes of parts in, but it was all for Heather’s new laptops, so I’ll have her come take them away eventually.

After work, took the last few laptops to The UPS Store and encountered a loud, ignorant couple that was just hellbent against wearing masks. It seemed like they were just out for an argument, because he was wearing a completely open mesh mask that I guess was intended to comply with the most generic definition of the word. The girl at the counter asked them to step away, and they both immediately started spouting off about how the CDC said surgical masks didn’t protect against COVID-19, and asked on whose authority was his mask deemed unworthy. I’m sure if they had done a little more digging on that same internet where they found their information, they would have learned that idiots and assholes are not protected classes of people, and that private establishments like The UPS Store aren’t infringing on their rights by not serving them. I spent the rest of my evening winning arguments and delivering sick burns to them in my mind.

I stopped by to see Summer on the way home, and then finally broke out my new carpet cleaner to make my living room a little less gross. It seemed to do a really great job, and really made me want to continue on cleaning the rest of the house. It did pull up a lot of carpet lint, but I figured at its age, that wasn’t enough of a reason to stop cleaning. I felt like the room looked a lot better when I was done.

Summer headed over after work while I ran to Walmart to pick up some wet cat food. Split has lost a ton of weight from his formerly fat and floppy self, so I imagine he’s finally on his way out after 15 years. He really took to the canned food when I got home though, so maybe he was just having trouble with the dry stuff.

I warmed up the leftover nachos with some extra salad stuff and watched Forged in Fire with Summer until she started to fall asleep on the couch. I think even I was more tired than I realized.

The lady asked you to leave….

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One, Two, Three O’Clock, Four O’Clock, Dock

I went in this morning and scrapped the flash drives I made yesterday in favor of making new ones with current Windows Updates. While that processed, I got a cart together and started replacing docking stations. I just kept chugging along, well into lunch. I missed the email that Ben sent out offering to buy everyone lunch to welcome Kyle to the team. He called me just after I found it, and I ran to Linh to meet them.

After lunch, I chugged away at more docks until I finished the bottom floor. That left me just enough time to start copying more flash drives before heading home to change. Then I went by Mark’s office again to help his other staff with their questions.

When I got back home, the house was a balmy 85 degrees, and it was clear that my air conditioner was doing nothing but pushing hot air around. Summer went home, and I picked up some Taco Villa for dinner on the way.

Summer had Forged in Fire on, but otherwise it was an uneventful night. At least it was cool in her house.

Start a dockin’ round the clock again…

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Commendearing Cow

I did it. I got up nearly an hour and a half early this morning in commitment to a joke that only served to entertain myself. I had the time, so I stopped in to Casey’s for a free breakfast slice on the way to work. When I got there, the new guy was already standing awkwardly downstairs outside the basement doors. I guess nobody told him we’ve been starting at 9am, so he showed up at 7:45am.

We went inside, and I invited him into Ben’s my office, where I planted my pirate flag and sat down in his my chair. We chatted for a few minutes while I opened up my laptop to check some email, until Ben and Greg walked in together. Ben came in and without any hesitation just knocked my pirate flag off his desk and pushed me out of his chair. I was really hoping we’d have an hour to chat alone, but with Kyle starting his first day and others trickling in, it just didn’t happen. We all sort of openly groaned about how disappointed we were in his response to the board last night, but I guess that’s just what we get for trying.

I made my way to the high school and started on a few things there. Most of it blurred together into a haze of meaningless work, but I know I got a couple docking stations swapped. It was uncharacteristically quiet for my hallway, but I wasn’t going to complain. I made my way back to the shop in case anyone wanted to have lunch, and Allen suggested Cici’s. He got Greg and Josh to go, and even Kyle and Melinda decided to join us. Summer took the day off from work and met us there to eat.

Kyle was kind of super awkward, though seemingly familiar. He kept making jokes about all the cops and Army fellows coming in because they heard about my act of piracy this morning, but I never saw anyone from the Navy.

After lunch, I started to go back to the high school but got roped into helping Allen get the bus yard gate open. I thought it would be an easy task, but then we both got trapped and had to call on Gary to let us out. I guess our garage door opener was failing, so he had to borrow one from maintenance to let us out.

Once I finally got back to the high school, the afternoon went by pretty quickly. I started pumping out flash drives for the student devices, and it was time to go before I knew it. I headed home to meet Richard from Dependable, and he poked around my air units to check for leaks. I’m not even sure he checked whether it was low, but he ended up adding some dye before he left, and said he would be back in a few weeks.

Summer came back shortly after, and I started picking up a tiny bit while she watched TV. I washed my comforter, warmed up some egg rolls, and made myself a salad with what she brought over. We spent the evening shopping and dreaming about cars, and it just made me sad to know how poor I am.

You know it’s going to be a long day when you start by commandeering the whole department.

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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.