Tag: work

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The Handout

Today started the three-day process of handing out 1:1 laptops at the high school. I’ve secured my place for all three days because I feel like right now I deserve some light work. I’ve spent too long pushing other people this summer, so I don’t care to be selfish enough to do something I want to do now. It won’t get me any closer to getting my own work done, but technology be damned.

We were meeting at 10:00 for the handout, so I got a little bit of time in at Oakland to clean up a few work orders before then. I’m hoping that my absence in the buildings will motivate others to try a little harder at setting up their own things. It’s not hard to plug in a computer, even with all the peripherals they have. Once I got to the high school, it was a relatively easy day to deal with seniors that have all gone through this before. We actually handed out just under 300 laptops, so the next two days will be much crazier. It’s my kind of crazy though, and I doubt anyone back at the shop is breaking much of a sweat doing anything else.

Once that was over, I had to run to the junior high to take care of a couple things before heading home. Summer got there right after I did, and we went to my parents’ house to swim and have dinner. Julie brought a tiny hairless baby critter over, and nobody knew quite what to do with it. Most of us voted to euthanize it because it looked like it wouldn’t survive very long. She left to try and find someone to take care of it, and ultimately did. After she left, I guessed correctly that it was a squirrel, which made me regret not trying to raise it. I probably didn’t really want a pet squirrel, but I’ve always thought I did since I was a child. In any case, it’s got better odds now.

When we got back home, I started a load of laundry while we watched a couple episodes of The Office before bed.

But I’m the one that does that!

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Slags

Another day of motivating my coworkers. A recycling company was scheduled to visit today, so I took a trunk full of scrap electronics to work with me. Then it was straight into hanging TVs at the middle school. Neither Jason nor Amanda claimed to feel very well today. I’d like to say this affected their performance, but it noticeably didn’t. There was every bit as much leaning and sitting and playing on cell phones as usual. I did what I could to push everyone along as quickly as possible because I still had two more to hang at the junior high.

We finished up right around lunch time. Ryan, Dale, Allen, and I met Summer at Ruby Tuesday for salads. They were super busy this time. I guess people have started to catch on to the special pricing announcements.

When we got back to work, the recyclers were cleaning out our graveyard. I was supposed to help take some laptop carts to the middle school, but I was reassigned to one of Jason’s work orders with Amanda to set up three dual-monitor stands at the special services building. We didn’t even get to jump into that right away though, because just as I was walking in to do that, a FedEx truck pulled up with three pallets of Chromebooks for mostly my building. Gary and I unloaded all of those pallets into the graveyard, and then Amanda and I completed our re-task.

After work, Summer and I went to my parents for dinner. We both ate too much and then called it an early night because we were both so tired. We caught a couple episodes of The Office, and then headed straight to bed.

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Work Hard, Not Smart

I feel like the new school year is coming faster than I’m prepared for. I still have two labs worth of laptops to take care of on top of the usual setting everyone’s computer back up so they can get back to work. I was excited that I’d get the morning to take care of my own things. That’s about the time Allen asked for help mounting panduit on the walls at his campus. He loaded the entire toolbox into the truck to do this. I had to run to the junior high pretty immediately to take care of a surprise-fried computer, but I called him as soon as I was done. He was sitting in the truck waiting for me to help him unload the toolbox, even though all he really needed was a hacksaw. When I got there, he was parked on the wrong side of the building at the far end of the parking lot. Him saying it wouldn’t hurt me to walk just about set the tone for the rest of the day. No rest for my possibly-fractured foot today.

We spent most of the morning taking care of two panduit runs and then one internal wall run where he cut the pull line I was planning to leave in place for the future. It just kept getting dumber from there, and it was immensely frustrating, but I had to just laugh it off. To care too much there is to drive oneself mad. I spent what little time I had left before lunch at Oakland and tried to take care of a couple work orders. I got tied up with the librarian there, so I didn’t even get to leave lunch until 10 minutes late, so I ended up just going home for a couple slices of leftover pizza.

When I got back to work, we went upstairs to build a few laptop carts, not quite certain how many we needed to build and with what quantity of laptops in each. It mostly didn’t matter, though, because the cables were tied directly to a circuit board, and we maxed out the connections. When we finished, we loaded up two trucks worth of TVs, again for the middle school, and headed to start mounting them. Jason made a comment about mounting them tomorrow, and I scolded him into admitting that we could “probably get one” done before quitting time.

We had to wait at the front door with our load until Dale, Ryan, and Amanda finished unloading theirs and brought us the dolly. While we waited, I started to unload the truck, and Jason made a comment about not wanting to have to lift all the boxes twice in order to get them inside, even though I really didn’t add any extra steps. He was content to lean against the truck and watch me work, so I told him to run inside and find Allen, who was still trying to get two dual monitors working since I left him before lunch. I was finally afforded the silence to unload the entire truck by myself. Once we got everything inside, we managed to mount four TVs before heading back to the shop. On the way to the dumpster, I lost a box in the road, which just frustrated me more after I was made fun of for packing trash the way I do.

After work, I came home and waited for a long-winded Summer to get there so we could go to my parents’ house for dinner. We had a nice talk, then went to eat some bún thịt nướng. She did really great with the chopsticks. We killed a bit of time while a small storm rolled through, then went to the shop to pick up some scrap that I wanted to play with before it was sent to recycling. I feel like a crazy person, and most at work would probably agree, but this type of equipment still has a lot of novelty to me.

Break out the red ink.

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Once more, with feeling.

I may have fussed a bit this morning about always being on Team Lift. Jason broke down and said I could trade with noodle-armed Amanda if I wanted, but I didn’t want to do that to her. That shouldn’t have been my call to make. I ended up having to break away to fix something at the junior high anyway, so I had to catch up to the guys at the high school after that was done. We ended up hanging one TV twice because Dale wanted it higher after the fact. We only managed two inches higher, but every bit helped.

After hanging those TVs, we took a break for lunch. I started thinking it, and then Dale said it out loud – Western Sizzlin. We were on the same wavelength, so it was a done deal.

When we got back from lunch, and after a bit of arguing about Jason’s incorrect direction for the naming of Allen’s 90 new laptops, we touched every one of them again to correct them. I ended up hitting a wall, and nobody else was anxious to do any work as usual, so we rode it out until 3:00 and headed home.

I got home and was assaulted by anxiety-inducing emails and tried to mellow out with a couple beers. Such a wasted evening. I was tired anyway.

She’s done worse for only two inches.

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No Power to Breathe

We lost power in the middle of the night last night, and I couldn’t breathe for the few hours while it was out. I tried going to sleep without my CPAP, but I just tossed and turned and couldn’t pass out at all. Eventually the lights all came on and I was back in business, but I was ragged by the time I had to get up to go to work. I don’t know what happened, but it just affected a small area down my street.

Once at work, we hooked up the trailer to deliver a bunch of Chromebook carts. I feel like I have way more devices than students, and it just feels ridiculous. It would make more sense if they actually used them properly, but most of the time they end up used as babysitting devices.

Allen and I went to Taco Villa for lunch, and then Amanda went with us to run some security wires in the high school arena. I got even more frustrated with Jason while trying to figure out exactly what we needed to do. We loaded up two trucks to go over there, and then as soon as we got there, Jason said he was going to show me what needed to be done because he had to leave us. I don’t know why I let myself be surprised at all by that. The rest of the afternoon ended up being me slave-driving the other two, because neither of them wanted to do anything. We would have finished the entire job in plenty of time if they had stopped dicking around in the bleachers, but instead we made it back to the shop a few minutes late. On the way there, we saw three fire trucks outside the Blue Chip Ice Co, which seemed super ironic.

After a quick trip home to change, I went to pick up Eaddie and talked her into going swimming for a while since she had been sitting in the house watching The Flash all day long. She resisted the whole way there, but we had fun once she got in the pool. Summer came over after her workout and picked her up to run home and get some things before coming over.

I went home and set up my new monitor before they got there. It just barely fit, with the back leg of the mount barely secured on the back edge of the desk. I could mount it on an arm, but that’s a project for another day. It’d probably be preferable to switch desks anyway. We didn’t get to start Rampage like we wanted because they got here so late, so instead we watched an episode of New Girl with some cake and ice cream, then called it a night.

What happened to pride in one’s work?

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You are maddeningly inconsistent.

I got really frustrated with several things at work today. The first task I was given was something that was scheduled for Jason to do yesterday, but he didn’t do it then because presumably he and Allen spent the afternoon watching a girl at the UPS Store properly pack the leased laptops he was supposed to ship back. The man is either completely devoid of any common sense, or a complete genius. I’ve never seen someone hand off so much of his own work in my life.

After Amanda and I finished that task for him, we went to Sequoyah to pull cables and rearrange a room for a new teacher there. This was frustrating for a few reasons. Firstly, the room was already in perfect form with the SMART board in the middle of one wall and the computer desk in the middle of an adjacent wall. Secondly, the technology committee is supposed to be there to deny requests like this that aren’t backed by any real instructional need. Thirdly, I felt like Ben should have stood his ground as a part of the committee. I get that the principal there may not make requests very often, so requests should be taken seriously. It was the fact that this particular room should have been the template for the setup of every other room in the district. The new layout made no sense, and I was made to feel like I was taking crazy pills just because Amanda didn’t want to try and convince her principal otherwise.

I left for lunch with Dale and Ryan at Chick-fil-A, then came back and completed the job with Amanda. I’m sure that I probably let myself get too upset over it, and at the end of the day I’m paid to do a job, so I completed the job. It was just compounded frustrations with specific coworkers.

That’s about the time Jason told Amanda and me that we wired too many of the laptop carts the other day, and that we would have to go undo the work we had just done.

That was right after he blew up in front of me about not being able to image a computer with Ryan’s new setup, even though he’s been told specifically how to do it correctly multiple times.

Home and beer in a quiet house.

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Iunno…

Dale was ready to roll this morning, and he and Ryan ended up pushing everyone else to get to work. We loaded up two groups of three and headed to Center Valley to replace eight touch panels. Ryan and I did four touch panels in the time that it took Jason, Zach, and Allen to do three. Dale took care of inventory for both groups since we didn’t need the extra hand. I wish we could get points for good work.

Dale, Allen, and I went to New China for lunch since we had a relatively light afternoon. I’m not sure what anyone else did, but Dale, Ryan, and I went to the high school to image a couple labs and reroute some cables into ceiling drops. I was just glad to be there so they couldn’t gripe about me not working along with the rest of the crew.

After work, I stopped at the car wash to clean all the grime off of the Murano from our trip. Then it was home for the evening. I spent some more time re-looking in every corner of my house for my box fan that seems to have completely vanished. Then I tracked down a leak in my air conditioner that was leaving puddles in the floor of my closet. Dad’s eagle eye spotted a drain plug that simply fell out, so tomorrow I’ll have to try and find a new one that fits.

Google it.

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Won’t you take me to Junkytown?

Today had me beat. We spent all day taking down projectors and SMART boards from the high school, and almost every single room was really hot with no air circulation. The heat, plus lots of boards mounted to drywall instead of brick made for a difficult and sweaty time. We filled up two truck beds before lunch and had to unload them into an already full graveyard. Someone got wise and asked if we could take the projectors and mounting booms to the scrap metal yard, and we got a little over 30 bucks for it all. For technology that really probably wasn’t all that bad, I found that to be pretty frustrating.

After a quick lunch at Quiznos, we jumped right back into it at the high school. The guys at the scrapyard indicated to our guys with the first load that there needed to be more metal than what they got, so Zach and I drove to a different scrap yard in the afternoon. They didn’t want to pay anything at all, but they offered to let us throw them into a junk pile. It kind of broke me a little inside to be throwing that stuff away when presumably it could be sold or donated to someone in need. Summer gears are turning, though, and we have to move the merchandise.

When we got back to the shop, we were told we had a truck coming with several pallets of stuff for us, so we all had to wait outside and clean out more room in the graveyard to store the new stuff. That took us the rest of the work day, so there was no hope of going home early for most of us. Somehow Jason managed to disappear somewhere, and Dale waved goodbye as he drove off.

I went straight to my parents’ house to have a swim in the pool for a while. Summer and Eaddie came over to join me eventually. I left for a bit to get cheap Kroger gas with Dad and Julie, and then it was back to swim. Mom made pork and shrimp spring rolls for dinner, so we stayed for that. Everyone else was pretty tired by then, so we came back to my house to crash.

Where the heck did I put that box fan?

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“We’re ready master.” “I’m not ready!”

Back to work. I woke up pleasantly ahead of schedule and made it to work a few minutes early. It was a pretty light day, with just a couple touch panels to install in the morning, and then the afternoon to myself at Oakland. I guess as far as coming back to work, this wasn’t too bad.

After work, I came home and set up my mini fridge. Summer came over to take me to meet Autumn at band camp for dinner, but I ended up not going. As I got the fridge set up to the point that I had to let it cool down, Mom texted for me to come clean up some leftover spring rolls. I ate and ran, coming home to fill the now-cool fridge with drinks. I ended up removing a couple shelves to get things to fit the way I wanted. It’s a silly convenience, but I like the way it looks with how it’s stocked.

Summer and Eaddie got here just as I was finishing up there, and we had some of Dad’s banana bread with ice cream before bed. I feel exhausted for what little I’ve done today.

I miss being away.

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Is this trash?

It was kind of an odd day at work today. I had to run to Oakland first thing to take care of some summer school stuff. While I was there, I found my tadpoles were more frog than tadpole. I’m pretty sure they ended up being leopard frogs. They’re going to have to be released in a day or two.

When I finished there, I met Amanda, Dale, and Allen at the middle school to hang a TV and clean out computers. I basically ended up dusting out an entire computer lab before lunch. I met Allen at KFC, then went back with him and Amanda to finish hanging the TV and rearrange another room. That move was so involved, it lasted until the end of the day even with all three of us. It was nice to have a group project where everyone actually kept busy.

After work, Summer and I went to pick up the betta from the library at the junior high, but Jessica had already taken it home because I took too long. From there, we went to Gardner to check out some discard stuff. We ended up taking every bit of it – two full-sized filing cabinets, two bookshelves, a kid’s table, and a couple raised monitor stands. It took us three trips to the junior high to drop off most of that, and then we took the table to Summer’s house for Eaddie. On the way, we stopped to pick up some Taco John’s because we worked up our appetites, then took it back home to eat over an episode of The Office.

There’s an ugly monster in my head that someone put there a long time ago.