Tag: work

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Guv’mint Work

I had an awful time trying to get to sleep last night for some reason. I don’t remember thinking or feeling anything at all. I just remember not being asleep for longer than I wanted to be. To make matters worse, for some reason my shower would never get hot. I ran straight-hot water and it just felt cool. I turned the water heater up a bit and the water felt quite hot later, so I don’t know what was going on.

My office light was on and the door was ajar when I got there, but to my surprise no one was there. I spent some time investigating to find out who had been there, but the hallway lights turning on and off all night made that a nearly impossible task. I assume Jason had gone in there last week and left it that way, but I may never know.

Gary went to help Amanda, Brice, and Heather finish the cable runs at vo-tech, so once I got my laptops started I went to help as well. The first couple runs ended up being a bit easier than we originally expected, but it still took us all morning. Brice and I went to Zaxby’s for lunch and then went to run one more line in the afternoon. It was quite a bit worse, and the end point actually came out at the top of the raised ceiling, back into a hole in the wall, and then out of a surface mount box at an accessible height. It was super stupid, but we managed to use the old line as a pull without losing it in the wall.

I finished up the afternoon and completed the 1:1 laptop imaging task. I’ve got a few more things I’d like to do, but I don’t know how much time I’ll get to do that after seeing how many Chromebooks are left for the others to enroll. At the end of the day I gathered up a bunch of stuff to take to the DMV and headed across town.

It was a surprisingly small crowd with only one person in line ahead of me, but I was informed that after all that trouble to find my boat’s hull identification plate, I would have to visit someone to get a longer replacement tag before I could re-register the boat. I had also forgotten to add the Murano and Grom to my..account?.. I’ve already assessed for the year, so I have to call before 4pm to add the two new vehicles, and I guess I can’t do it online. For some reason I had hoped the government would suck a little less by 2019, but here I am, unable to complete any of my three required tasks.

Defeated and annoyed, I went home and started cleaning up a bit. I’m trying to do some more frequent water changes to drop nitrate levels a bit more. Summer came by with some Quiznos for dinner before heading to the gym. Then I spent the rest of the evening wandering around the house picking at little things. I need to spend a whole day cleaning up the living space, but that just feels impossible.

It must be so nice to leave at 4 every day forever.

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The Time I Almost Stole Dinner

We didn’t get to finish up the 1:1 laptops today. Instead, Jason took a crew to get a bunch of bottled water for the shop while the rest of us enrolled Chromebooks in the graveyard. When they got back, I was upset to see a literal pallet of water bottles. I don’t even drink the bottles, and it aggravates me that everyone else does. We don’t live in a third world country. We don’t live in Mexico. We don’t even live in Flint, Michigan. Paying thousands of dollars every year for water that comes with its own trash just seems insane to me, and nobody is even a little bit sympathetic, or even appears understanding to the idea that this is just terrible.

Once we got the pallet unloaded, we took two trucks worth of stuff to vo-tech to run a bunch of network cable. I don’t have a ton of experience running lines out there, but I know enough to know that it’s terrible. We encountered a wall without visible penetration, so we didn’t get our WAP lines run. We did at least manage to find existing cabling where most of the phones were going, which was a great relief.

We all went to Stoby’s for lunch and crammed us three fatties, Allen, and Gary into a booth. When we got back, we reminded everyone that Gary and I didn’t leave early in the middle of the week like everyone else, and that we would be leaving early today. We wrapped up a couple lines and then left at 1:30. I dropped Gary off back at the shop and then went home and took a nap because I felt completely exhausted.

When I woke up, I got my things together and headed to Walmart for groceries. Ronda, Steven, and Maleea were coming over for dinner, and I wanted to make Instant Pot chicken tacos. I was a bit impatient while checking out with Walmart Pay, and forgot that I had received a new Discover Card number after discovering an unauthorized charge. My payment didn’t go through, so I had to run back to the register and apologize for looking like a thief and/or a fool. They had printed a receipt with all my groceries just as I showed up, and with a quick scan of a single barcode, it loaded up my entire purchase again so I could process my payment the old fashioned way.

The girls did a pretty good job of cleaning the place up, and dinner went together pretty well. I completely forgot the slaw mix and punch in the refrigerator, which was super disappointing. Nobody really seemed to notice though, because we had so much other stuff to put on the tacos. Now I’ve got to figure out what else to do with the stuff though, since no one else ever seems interested in eating it.

The girls hung out and played and did whatever kids do in 2019 while we sat at the table and chatted. After the others left, Summer crashed and Eaddie and I watched some Daredevil, though she evidently watched quite a bit without me. I guess that’s how it us during boring old summer vacation.

There are no heroes, no villains. Just people with different agendas.

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Exactly Prepared

The cafeteria staff had a meeting at the high school this morning, for which I had prepared 40 laptops. The initial request was for like 20, I was asked for 30, and they used 37. I was very happy to have overestimated the original overestimations to come out looking like a boss. Ben had me run to the house to grab my Yeti microphone that they didn’t end up using for the conference call, and then Gary and I continued imaging laptops. The three of us met Heather at Chick-fil-A for lunch, and then we dropped Ben back off before going back to imaging.

Heather hung out with us until her LanSchool conference call and vented about the inefficiencies of the group she worked with all morning. We just sort of had to laugh and roll our eyes, because it’s always that way with Jason. Being away all week has been awesome.

After work, I spent some time cleaning house before going to Walgreens to get my prescription, then to my parents’ house to get a picture of the sailboat’s hull identification number tag. Fortunately Dad was able to find it today after the mounting nails had rusted out. Back home, I picked up what I could around the house until bed.

Mango mango mango.

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Friends and Stuff

Gary and I spent all day imaging laptops again. Ben bought lunch for Melinda’s first day, and everyone walked next door to Smackin’ Wings and Things. They had a 20-piece wing special that cost as much as a larger meal, so I just ate that. The Cyclone Fever sauce was a pretty good mix of hot honey mustard and sweet honey barbecue.

In the afternoon, Melissa dispatched someone to check out my air conditioner, so I had to do a bit of juggling to get Dad over to the house, and get Summer to open the garage since my app still doesn’t work with the Android beta. Fortunately I’m not completely crazy and he did find the unit a little low on refrigerant. He said he’d come by again next week to check again, so I’ll have to spend some time there in the afternoons to see if it cools any faster.

Summer took the day off and spent some time with the kids at the Clarksville water park, and then came home to grill steaks and burgers for us. She invited Gary over for dinner, and luckily I got there right as he was turning around to make another pass by her house. We played a couple games of Magic, ate, had a couple beers outside on the fancy new lawn furniture, and then came in to play Stuff Happens with the kids.

Eaddie begged to watch Parks and Rec after Gary left, and after a couple episodes of that everyone headed on to bed.

Better dreams this time.

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Soggy Bottom Boys

I was supposed to meet Gary at the high school this morning, but he texted and said the basement flooded overnight with about an inch of water everywhere. Apparently the big pit they dug next to our building soaked up all the rain water over the past couple days, and of course water seeks the lowest level, and there’s nothing lower than technology. I was almost sad that I missed it, because as luck would have it, I had left my lifejacket there from Zach’s joke last week. Gary said he put it on as he waded around the shop among the dozen or so maintenance and custodian folks that were there to help with the mess.

Missing out on all of that fun, I just continued imaging laptops until Gary got there. Then we continued on until lunch, when we met with Shae for lunch at Colton’s. Vendor lunches are almost always great, except when the Belkin guy is weird. This one was one of our better ones, though I think we’ve only ever actually made one purchase from these guys. I guess a single six-digit piece of equipment is worth a few steaks though. Allen sat at the opposite end of the table with our little buddy intern from Friendship, and Brice got told in the everlasting argument between Cisco and everybody else. I was just happy to see Gary smile.

The afternoon went by pretty quickly again. I accidentally broke my ColdHeat soldering tool trying to solder some 1/4″ plugs to some speaker wire. We got very close to 600 total laptops imaged, so the end is at least visible. I just hope we don’t discover that we’ve missed something silly, but that seems really unlikely. Gary left my office a little early, and then I left a little late after starting another round of laptops. I went straight to my parents’ house to borrow a real soldering iron, and then Autumn called wanting to come swim.

Summer was off soon, so I just had her bring everyone over. All three kids went out to swim while she ate a bit, and then we joined them. The water was really cold after all the rain, but it was warm enough out that it felt fine after you acclimated. When it was time to go, they packed up and left while I waited for Dad to get back home from bible camp. I had him help me hunt down the sailboat hull identification number so I could renew the registration, but I’m pretty sure it broke off and we couldn’t find it anywhere.

Finally back home, I planted a stem of peppermint I pulled from the garden at the high school, and cleaned up for bed.

Dream time!

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Relief Work

I got off to a pretty rough start this morning, throwing an entire brand new bottle of pills all over the kitchen floor. Somehow I miraculously found every last pill and filled the bottle back up. All of this was because I noticed that Walgreens had incorrectly filled my prescription with a lower dosage than what I needed. I wouldn’t have noticed, except the pills were the wrong shape. I can’t wait until I’m old and dumb, and accidentally take the wrong pill that kills me.

I almost went straight to the high school to continue my imaging work, but I went to the shop as usual instead. It was a good thing though, because Gary needed the excuse to get away from the others at the office for a while. I can only imagine the frustration he feels when he tries to do things in a more correct way, but then gets told to just let other people do what they want instead. There’s no telling how much extra work has been created for him because someone else didn’t have the competency they needed to do it without breaking something.

Everyone else stayed at the shop, seemingly unmotivated, while he and I went to the high school to continue imaging. I didn’t particularly need the help, but it definitely helped to pass the time less painfully. It helped that I wore thicker-soled shoes this time too. We took a break for lunch at Arby’s and had enough time after we ate to stop by the house and see the Grom. It was then that we noticed a little bit of road rash on the rear fender indicating it had been stood up at least once. I guess it wasn’t too much of a surprise really, and I plan to get rid of it anyway. I haven’t had much time to look at mods, but I know there must be quite a few.

The afternoon went by just as quickly, and then I stopped into the shop after dropping Gary off. That’s where I learned that all the others combined only enrolled about 200 Chromebooks, while Gary and I finished up about 250 Windows computers with software deployments. That’s just the underpaid, peak efficiency model versus the Jason-lead group, I suppose.

When I left there, I stopped by Superfast to see Summer before going to Walgreens to fix my prescription. Fortunately I didn’t really have to put on my mean face, but I was only one wrong sentence away from doing so. From there I went to Summer’s to start making chicken salads. Autumn stayed with her grandparents, so the remaining three of us watched a couple episodes of Parks and Rec before I headed home.

I finished the night cleaning up after the pets, which was long overdue as usual. I’m going to have to find some time pretty soon, no matter the cost.

What’s the deal with Stonehenge?

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1200 Squats

I spent the entire day by myself imaging laptops. Between yesterday’s boot disk creation and today, I’ve completed 150 devices. There are only about 1050 left to go. I didn’t have a terrible time today, but next week is going to be a long week.

Allen was the only one that said anything about lunch, and we were both pretty hungry, so it was KFC or bust. Then it was right back to the grind. The music helps. Having things to rearrange helps too.

After work, I went home for a while and ended up vacuuming out my car so I could install the new WeatherTech floor mats. I got super hot and sweaty, but the job’s done and I’ll feel better about having those nasty children in and out of the car all of the time. I just wish they tucked under the door moulding to keep the crumbs from falling down between them.

I beat Summer and Eaddie home but just waited in the car for them. Then I fried up some chicken for their sandwiches, and Summer went to bed while Eaddie and I watched another episode of Daredevil.

I’m gonna have to get some better knee pads…

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Boot Nuked

I got to pull away from the low priority nonsense that’s been going around so I could deal with the more important stuff. Gary and I spent all day at the high school coming up with a process to create boot disks, breaking only for lunch at Wendy’s with Zach. It wasn’t stressful work, but we weren’t quite at the stage where we churn through hundreds of laptops yet either. At the end of the day, I finished up and then rebooted the computer as usual. Unfortunately I didn’t notice that I had forgotten to take the boot disks out of the USB ports, and the computer immediately booted back up and wiped itself.

After spending so much time making sure we copied all the files Dale saved for me, I wiped it all away in just an instant. I’ll have to pull the hard drive and try to recover some of those files, but I have a feeling that most of them aren’t that important. It’s still a good lesson in keeping important things off of the local machine though. I had been thinking about getting rid of the desktop and going to a docking station setup anyway, so this just kind of forced me along into trying that out sooner than I expected. I was so initially upset by my negligence that I decided to go ahead with rearranging the office. I stayed super late moving things around to how I wanted them, and I’m not even sure how long any of it will stay. At least it’s left in usable shape for tomorrow morning.

Summer left Eaddie with her parents and came to stay the night at my house. I hadn’t planned to eat because it had gotten so late, but then felt so hungry by the time I actually left, so she picked up some Taco Bell for us. I ate some, and then did some quick water changes in all of the tanks just to try and help out my recent negligence. That seems to be a running theme lately.

Are you leaving those here? Are those your own personal speakers??? Can you even hear me??????

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Runaround Blues

Jason had us take a crew of four to Oakland this morning to do what really only two probably should have done. We’ve got pallets worth of higher priority work to do, and we’re doing cleanup crap, and it’s just infuriating as usual. I peeled off with Amanda, which somehow made it less bad. Then she and I ate leftover turkey at the shop while the others went out to eat.

After lunch, I managed to escape and run around with Gary for a bit, mostly to start looking at high school stuff. While we were there, it started to pour down rain, so we stayed longer than originally planned. We explored the PAC some more while trying to find some people there. All we ever heard were ghost whistling and wood cutting, but no people.

Once it cleared up, we went to the junior high and helped Heather with some stuff for the rest of the day. I stopped by the high school on the way home to deliver my refrigerator from the junior high. I think I may have scratched up the front a bit, but it was a gimme anyway. I shouldn’t be too attached.

I went home and got ready to go to Sheri’s father’s visitation at Humphrey. I’d only met the guy a couple times and only in passing, but I at least wanted to stop by to see her for a second. I told her it really felt like I was in line for a buffet that was just taking forever, so I didn’t want to keep her long. There was a good sided group of people there, and it was nice to see them outside of work for a change. Everyone was all smiles, as I think they should be in the best of scenarios.

Becky, Marcia, Miranda, Mollie, and I all went to Ruby Tuesday afterward for dinner and drinks, and we had a grand ol’ time. Our waitress was awesome and took all three coupons I had, and worked her magic to split the discounts across all five tickets. When we left, I dropped Becky off at her car, then had to stop in to see Summer for a minute. She and Eaddie were watching Spider-Verse in bed, and I had a bed of my own at home that still hadn’t been cleared, so I left to do that and get some sleep there for the first time in over a month.

So long, flower man.

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The Princess Is in a Cooler Castle

I had to take an alternate route home this morning due to railroad construction, and then the extra traffic on the way in to work very nearly made me late. I spent all morning with Brice doing the cleanup work orders at Oakland. Allen came by and helped after taking care of something else.

Ben brought smoked turkey for lunch, so I had to run to Neighborhood Market for my side. I brought potato salad and rolls, because I didn’t realize Jason was bringing some kind of cheesy potato salad type dish. Both people in front of me in line paid by cash at the self-checkout, which was stupid and slow. Why do people use money?

The afternoon was more of the same, with the addition of Amanda and Jason for a short while. Summer and Ben stopped by after Mark stood them up for their meeting, but I couldn’t really help them. Ben let us have a working lunch, so most of us left early. I ended up going to the high school to drop off some things first, where I got caught up chatting with Bryan for a minute outside. I didn’t realize higher level administrators had the same number of contract days that we have.

I stayed super late in my new office, hooking up one of my speakers and contemplating a desk move. Then I went home and started water changes in all of the aquariums before having to pick Eaddie up from karate. We went by my parents’ house without any real plan, where we ended up eating some leftovers and doing puzzles. Eaddie was doing them on her phone, while I put together a 3D castle that Dad pulled out of the closet.

We headed back to Summer’s pretty late, and I was so exhausted that I just crashed there. It took my house a frustrating hour to cool down four degrees, and I don’t know if it’s the weather, or if there’s something wrong with the new unit, or if it’s just not designed to be shut off for long periods of time. In any case, I need to spend some more time at home now to take care of all of this stuff. I just feel like I’ve been run over by a school bus.

“And at the end of it all, my only regret is not spending more of my life working for a living.”  –nobody ever