Tag: work

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I challenge you to a Dual!

I rode the bike in this morning because it was supposed to be really nice in the afternoon, and I forgot I was supposed to take the girls home after school. My first stop was Oakland to drop off a stack of iPads that I was conveniently able to fit in my bag. I ended up having to work on them for a while more before I could leave, but eventually I found a fix. Then I went to the junior high to start setting up my last three dual monitor setups.

Lunch time rolled around right as I finished up my first one, so I took a break and rode to Subway across town. It took me 30 minutes just to get through the line, and then I took it home to eat since I had to trade out for the car. I ran back by Oakland again to work on a couple of things, and ended up getting some help from Gary in the self-contained classroom. A couple of the kids were all over us, and one stole a water bottle out of Gary’s bag and drank it. He must have been in a good mood, because he didn’t seem too bothered by the kid, or the fact that I missed a stupid version check on my Chromebooks.

After that, I only had time to get one more dual monitor stand set up before I had to take the girls home. We went by my house first so I could change, and my Google Home Hub was delivered while we were there, so I set it up. I also dug out my gel ant farm in case I still have ants in the bathroom, but all the gel dried up. I tried boiling some water to dissolve the gel and left it to dissolve overnight.

When we got back to Summer’s house, I pulled out all of the leftovers I could find and made the kids eat that. Some stuff got thrown out, and I ate the oldest stuff I could find that didn’t seem like it had completely turned. Then I played a few rounds of Overwatch before bed.

Here Lies Michael: Hater of Waste

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New Ryan

Brice finally started today, though I’m still fuzzy on how he started so long after his contract start date. More importantly, I finally found out what my building assignments would be, and it looks like it’s just more of the same. I think they’re expecting Brice to pick up mostly where Ryan left off, and I hope it does work out, but I knew I’d have mixed feelings about it no matter what. Ben said he dreaded the thought of having to have a conversation with Sheri about taking me away from her building, so I guess their constant bragging on me isn’t lost.

Zach, Jason, and I hung a broken(?) touch panel in the coaches’ office, mostly to get it out of the warehouse since nobody else wanted it. Then we hung a new one for Allen before lunch. Everyone but Allen and Heather came to Brangus, but it wasn’t much ado about anything. Afterward it was just back to work orders for me.

After work, I came home and played a few rounds of solo Rocket League until Summer got there. I spent some time cleaning up a CamelBak for her race tomorrow, and then we went to La Huerta to split some fajitas for dinner. I stopped to air up my cold tires on the way home, and then she read her book while I played some doubles with Josh until bedtime.

Dude, you’re making it look like they actually pay us fairly around here!

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Well I don’t want to see you waiting.

Zach griped at me this morning for wasting my time playing with a Firefox deployment I made yesterday. I just need experience fighting with some of this stuff so I can get better at it. There’s always time for work orders later.

Jason texted and asked if I wanted to go to Las Palmas for lunch, so when he and Ben got back to the shop, we met Dale there. My taco salad was hot and fresh, but there’s no denying that the key lime candy at the register was my favorite part.

After lunch, I went to the junior high for a little bit, but ended up leaving to take care of some work back at Oakland before ultimately ending the day at the junior high. Autumn got rained out of color guard at the game, but Eaddie was upset that she wouldn’t get to watch TV at my house, so I took the girls home with me while Summer went to the gym. Josh met me there just long enough to hand over the laptop I picked up for Summer, and the girls settled in for an episode of Criminal Minds.

When Summer got to the house, we went to Burger King for the best family deal coupon in town. I had more burgers than heads for under 20 bucks. We just happened to be on the Halloween episode of The Office, so we watched that before the girls went home for the night. Then I finished laundry and headed to bed myself.

I’m wasting my time agaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiinnnnnn!

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Powerpuff Curls

I stopped by Oakland for just a little bit this morning, but most of the teachers I was there to see were out for the day. It was just as well though, because work orders started pouring in from the junior high. I guess there was some kind of power issue there over the last few days, because I had several SMART boards that wouldn’t power on at all and just needed to be power flushed. I ran around the building doing that over and over again after spending half an hour on my first one thinking it was a component problem.

I took a late lunch, and after some difficulty deciding where to go, I ended up at Wendy’s for a salad. They were packed, and the service was pretty slow because they only had one register open. It seems to be a trend for them lately. The salad was really good, even though I was craving fried chicken or burritos. I tried to make a healthy choice.

I spent the afternoon picking up loose ends from old work orders, and I’m getting to the point where I really need to focus my energy on learning how to pick up the slack that Ryan left behind. It’s been tough motivating myself lately though.

After work, I went home to start some laundry before heading to Summer’s for the evening. She picked up some Little Caesar’s after I suggested it, ending my short run at lighter meals.

I’m sure I’ll be much more productive tomorrow when it’ll be cooler, cloudy, and a little rainy.

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Conferred

Ben started off the morning addressing relatively singular issues as though they were widespread, and then we split up to do work orders all day. I went to Oakland first and shuffled some batteries around since that place was a ghost town. Then I went straight to the junior high until lunch. Summer had a break then as well, so we went to Taco Bell where I ran into my old classmate Noreen. I kind of expected her to take off and really make something of herself, so that was a bit of a surprise.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on into a late evening working on various things at the junior high. Conferences started at 1:00 and ran until 7, so I stuck around wandering between work orders and chatting with people that were there. I don’t find a lot of people that are social employees the way that I am. Most people are just in and out, but I kind of enjoy sticking around after hours sometimes. Plus I got to chow on some La Huerta that they set up for the teachers, so dinner was done, and dessert was amazing.

After work, I had to run to Walgreens to pick up a FedEx package that was dropped there for me. I tried answering the doorbell while I was at work, but for some reason it cut out just as I was asking if he could bring it to our office for a signature. The notification that he dropped it off at Walgreens was a complete surprise, but I’m glad he did because I wasn’t expecting it until tomorrow, nor for it to require a signature.

Back home, I washed some socks and crashed early from my long day.

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A Fault and Battery

It was frosty this morning, so I had to let the car warm up before I could get home. Somehow after all of that I managed to make it to work a bit early, but it didn’t take too long before my jacket got too hot. We all went to the middle school to hang and shuffle some TVs and touch panels around. I didn’t know until later, but Allen showed me that the first one we did ended up getting damaged somehow on the side, so I’m absolutely sure it’s just going to end up being a junked TV at some point. I’m hoping I can swipe it for my office, but I guess we’ll see.

Dale, Allen, and I went to KFC for lunch, as Autumn and Summer texted me from the Wendy’s drive-through. Then Jason’s plan for after lunch was for all of us to go to our buildings to scope out what battery components we needed in order to complete the upgrade. The problem here is that not a single one of those guys had any idea what they were even looking for. After milling around for a while, I ended up pulling all of the remaining batteries out of the graveyard and taking Allen and Amanda to the high school to meet Dale so we could scope out his closets. He ended up only needing one of the three spare battery expansions I found, and we switched over four of his closets before heading to Oakland.

They were in the middle of parent-teacher conferences, so all we could do was drop off three pairs of batteries before heading back to the shop. I asked Allen to go to his building now that we knew what we were looking for, and he kept arguing that he wanted to see what Jason had for us to do. I ended up driving the three of us over to the middle school to do it, and he ran around looking at his other closets while Amanda sat on the couch and I went to the truck to get the last two battery expansions for the controllers he and Jason had already brought to his office.

We ended up getting out right at quitting time, but then I had to put the truck away. I went downstairs to chat with Ben for a minute on the way out, and he asked how I’d feel about having my campuses shuffled. I don’t want to leave either of them, but it’s looking like there are other issues in play, and all I can do is hope that he’s not just moving a problem from one place to another rather than addressing it properly with disciplinary action.

Summer came over in the evening and we picked up some Tropical Smoothie for her dinner, then came back home and watched an incredible IMAX 3D documentary about the Hubble telescope, appropriately named Hubble. It was probably the best quality 3D I have ever seen because everything was super crisp and clear, and not blurred with fast-motion, high-action sequences.

You see, this is why I never really get stressed out. We are so very insignificant, and nothing that we do could possibly ever matter in the grand scheme of things.
But yeah, sure. I’ll get right on those TPS Reports.

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They’re Missing the Point

“The whole point of the conference is to get us out of there and get away from the work orders and the teachers.” Quote of the day, and at least one of the themes for the whole day. Jason was clearly only there so he could not be at work. Some may be puzzled by how this might make any difference at all.

Classes started at 8:30 for real this morning, so I grabbed breakfast and headed into my classes. I was really disappointed by two out of three today, with the first being mostly a sales meeting, or at the very least an introduction to what they do sell. The second class was actually pretty good, though not necessarily very useful since we don’t actually have any Extreme equipment. The third was another dud only because it was an hour class on how to perform fewer than six steps. I don’t even know why it was a class. It could have been almost anything else.

The lunch was buffet-style this time, and pretty awesome. Fried pork chops and baked chicken with tons of extras. It was way better than yesterday, and the carrot cake for dessert was awesome. I failed to win any door prizes, so we headed home right after lunch. I dropped Jason off at his house, then merged back onto the interstate right next to Dale and Allen. I think Heather and Gary left quite a bit earlier in the day, but I don’t know when.

When I got back into town, I decided to stop by the shop to talk to Ben and Zach. Zach got his Pixel 3 XL in, and it seemed pretty nice, but he didn’t seem too keen on handling it much. I’ll get some more time with it once it’s in a case. Once he left work, I headed home to unpack before eventually making it to Summer’s. She had me take her to the football game to be honored for quiz bowl during halftime, and then we came right back home where I unpacked my stuffed swag backpack before bed.

The point is to learn something that you can bring back and share with the department.

Work Adventures

What Puts the Cot in ACOT?!

It was a pretty successful conference day. We started with breakfast around 7:30, and the first classes had been rescheduled from 8:30 to 9, so we had a bit more time to visit with the vendors and fill our goody bags before we got down to business.

I made the mistake of following Jason and Allen to a security class that surprisingly ended up being more of a talk about the company that rented the time slot than how to implement or improve access control, but I chickened out of the leadership class when I found out it was a round table discussion. In the future I’ll just jump right in anyway. I paid my dues.

Lunch was on them, and was barely a step above cafeteria food, but I expected as much. When we finished the day of classes, all except Jason went down to the steakhouse for dinner again, and then Jason wanted me to take him back to the liquor store because he accidentally dumped his in a drunken fit of Mortal Kombat. He, Gary, Heather, and I went to the liquor store together, and one of the guys at the store was so excited for me to buy their new mango habanero whiskey that he ran out to his car to get his own bottle to pour us a couple samples.

When we got back to the hotel, Jason went to his room and we traded him for Dale. Finally, after a brief run around the building looking for a corkscrew for Heather, the four of us sat by the fire until everyone but Gary trickled out to bed. He and I chatted for a couple hours longer before calling it a night, and I got to talk to Dad about our new guy a bit. Gary wants to see if we can get him trained by two generations of Zelnick just to see what happens, and I think that is just a capital idea!

-500 Int

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ACOT 2018

Everything was pretty well organized for me to leave this morning, so I headed home to shower and feed the fish, then packed and left for work. I had a bit more testing in the morning, and then I took care of as many work orders as I could at the junior high in the afternoon before we headed out.

I picked Jason up at his house in Atkins and we made our way to the Wyndham Riverfront in Little Rock. He was super anxious to get to a liquor store, so we drove to a pretty big one about half a mile away, then came back to the hotel for dinner. We all agreed to go downstairs to the steakhouse in the lobby, which actually turned out surprisingly nice. They had an “early bird special” for a buy one, get one free entree, and I decided to get two entrees for myself since the district was buying. So it was two 8oz medium rare filets with carrots, a giant baked potato, and a bowl of butter, sour cream, and cheese of equal mass for me. They increased the district reimbursement to $40, so I paid a grand total of $1.57 plus tip for my meal, plus nearly a whole pecan crusted salmon filet between Heather and Jason’s leftovers.

After dinner, we mostly split up, but Gary came back to my room to have a couple drinks with me. We ended up going out into the courtyard and met up with Dale, and the three of us chatted around a propane fire table for a few hours. An older couple came out and sat with us for a while, and ended up talking a lot of history and politics with Dale, which proved to be super entertaining for all. It was a really great night, and the weather was just perfect out there.

We eventually had to part ways so we could get some sleep before the classes in the morning, but I think it’s going to be a really great conference.

Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un would NEVER go for that!

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Call Me When It’s Over

I started off trying to finish up my printer work this morning, but was interrupted when Ben called to see if I could look at the junior high’s phone system with him. He had just gotten to my office when I noticed an email from my counselor at Oakland about an issue during Aspire testing. I failed to create calendar entries for the testing dates and completely forgot that it was happening today, so I had to drop everything and go there to sit on my hands after she resolved the issue by restarting the devices.

I sat mostly useless until lunch time when Jason texted me directly asking about lunch. I assumed he needed someone to go with so he wouldn’t be lonely, so I let him talk me into Fat Daddy’s in London, but when I got to the shop, he and Allen were outside waiting for me to pick them up. I ate some overly heavy nachos that left me dissatisfied, and then made it back to Oakland for afternoon testing.

When that finally wrapped up, I headed back to the office and tried to absorb as much information as I could from Ben as he showed me a bit about the Avaya system. I felt completely lost and overwhelmed, but I know I’m going to have to become intimate with that stuff sooner than later, so I soldiered on. After school let out, he and I went to the junior high to finish what we tried to start in the morning. Once he figured that out, he came to help with my printer issue, which we ultimately gave up on, and resolved manually on each machine.

After work, I headed home to gather things for the conference before heading to Summer’s for the evening.

‘Til you died, but you’re still alive.