Tag: work

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The Humidity of Our City – Our Ciiiity!

I scarfed down an apple fritter on the way home this morning, and was greeted by another dead A/C unit, presumably full of water again. At least the house had cooled down quite a bit, so I was able to get ready for work without too much additional sweat. I was running a tiny bit ahead, so I proceeded with adding the new shrimp to the kitchen aquarium. Dad showed up just before I left for work so he could house-sit while Dependable replaced my central heating and air. I figured it would be a few hours, but it ended up taking all day long.

Jason decided to take a look at the high school sign with me, which took quite a bit of walking and driving back and forth across the campus. We ended with the assumption that the outlet is bad, or at least giving dirty power that’s causing some issues. Everything else seems to be working correctly. When we got back to the shop, we loaded up with some cable and went to meet Heather at the junior high to pull a couple lines. I thought I had it down to the foot, but I ended up being super short and lost one of the two cables in the ceiling, so we had to finish after lunch.

Allen and Gary wanted to go to Bocadillos for lunch, but didn’t want to wait for me to get back to the shop, so I had to drive myself down to Dardanelle. The food had been better, and the salsa tasted like it had started to turn. To top it all off, I was charged double for my drink, and my mangonada cup was served super messy. I managed to make it home to check on Dad though. Bác Vân brought him lunch, but I felt bad that he had to sit in the hot house all day. I really had no idea it would take that long, and I didn’t leave him anything to keep entertained. I really should have just taken the day off myself.

Back at work, Jason stayed at the shop while Heather and I finished re-running and terminating cables. Then we ended the day with some battery swaps and a cooldown in the office. That’s when the rain finally hit, and it really poured. I wasn’t willing to wait it out, so I ran to the car, splashing through the flooded parking lot, and made my way home.

Baby Bye Bye Bye!

The guys were just finishing up with the equipment and needed to test the thermostat. It was a bit upsetting that they didn’t seem to have a clue how to use the Nest thermostat since Dependable is a registered Nest Pro. I had to set the thermostat up myself after plugging it in to a micro-USB cable to quickly charge it back up after they cut power at the breaker for it last month. They had enough other stuff to finish while we waited for the charge though, and eventually tested everything successfully. It took the house a few hours to cool down from the peak of 89 degrees, and the unit didn’t seem to be very fast at all. The air coming out of the vents was just barely cool, and the outside unit didn’t blow as hot as I expected. I was just happy to have something going though.

When Summer and Eaddie finished what they were doing, they came to pick me up and we went to my parents’ house for some leftover phở. We sat there for a little while before going back for my car. They went home and to sleep while I cleaned up a couple things at the house, and then I joined them for another night.

So much to catch up on now…

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16K Santa

It was a small crew this morning, so Ben sent the four of us to hang some touch panels before an early dismissal. We hung the first at Dwight before inspecting Sequoyah and then taking a lunch. We all agreed on Wendy’s, and then we were going to do work orders afterward. I chose to help Brice finish up at Sequoyah, and then finished the day delivering a speaker to my new office.

After work, I went home to change before heading out to the Clarksville Walmart for some TVs. I got four takers and picked up four ONN 50″ 4K TVs. The whole purpose of the trip was to replace Summer’s bedroom TV. Then my sister wanted one for her spare bedroom. I decided to pick one up for my parents since their TV still won’t play copy-protected sources. Finally, Gary decided to upgrade his smaller TV.

I made my way back home and delivered to Gary, and then my parents. I got Julie’s garage door camera and she let me in to her house while she was on the way home from work. I got the camera set up after a little trouble, and then she gave me a bowl of Blueberry Morning, which I don’t think I’ve had since before I moved out of my parents’ house. She said they stopped either making or carrying it locally, so she picked up a case or so.

You can’t say I never gave back!

Summer went to the gym after work, so I went to her house with the last TV and set it up as a surprise before taking Eaddie to my parents’ house for dinner and a swim. We stopped by the shop where I discarded her old TV before meeting her. Eaddie wasn’t hungry, so she jumped straight to the pool while I ate. When Summer got there, she didn’t want to eat either. I finished and then joined Eaddie for a swim, and Summer eventually came along for just a short while.

Dad got a couple telescopes out, but I think everyone was too tired to stand around looking through them. We ended the evening inside watching My Fair Lady, and headed back to Summer’s for the evening. I put on the rest of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse until Summer passed out.

Everybody knows that the best way to learn is under intense, life-threatening crisis!

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Be Happier, and That’s an Order!

I woke up around 4am and couldn’t go back to sleep for a long time. I felt like I just started to doze off a little bit around the time I had to get up. Ben had his little chat for us and basically told everyone to get along better and stop having poor morale over our pay. I hate that the district’s response to that is that they’ll help us find new employment if we don’t like it.

We loaded the trucks up and took two groups to Oakland to rehang touch panels. I’m pretty sure at least one of the rooms we hung had a newer projector, so it aggravates me that they didn’t even attempt to change the bulb before removing them. I guess I’ve just got to learn to ignore the stupidity at this point, but it’s just so damned aggravating.

Summer was running around with Ben schmoozing local businesses, and invited me out to lunch at Fat Daddy’s. It must be so nice to be appreciated by your employer.

After lunch, I kind of got left behind in the shop, so I spent the whole afternoon just chatting and sifting through Dale’s old Google Drive. It won’t be long before I have to dig right into the 1:1 laptops, and I couldn’t be less excited.

I went home after work and spent a bunch of time cleaning up. I took care of the cat, fish, cleaned up the kayak and put it away, and finally headed up to Summer’s. I beat her and Eaddie home, so I started cleaning up a salad with chicken strips. When they got in, we watched an episode of Parks and Rec, and I watched just a little bit of Into the Spider-Verse while they showered before bed.

Alright, let’s do this one last time.

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Revengers: Endgame

They’ve almost completely filled in the hole they dug to replace our parking lot. I was surprised both at how deep they dug, and how quickly they completed that much work. We had a super small crew today, so Jason took all four of us out to Center Valley to do some moving of equipment. He and Brice rolled together for most of it, while I wandered around with Allen and Amanda. They’re getting a bunch of new cubbies for the kids like most other elementaries have, so there were several rooms with technology that had to be relocated.

It was a pretty solid, yet relaxed day of work. We all went to Old South for lunch on Allen’s suggestion, and the place was absolutely packed. I saw Mr. Mathis walking in, and was a little surprised that he remembered and recognized me, and asked about my sister as well. The service was a bit slow on account of how many people they had crammed into the building, but was otherwise good. My pork chop was unremarkable, but the sweet potato was a good choice.

Daleism: They must not be rich, otherwise they’d have a covered Porchia.

We spent the rest of the afternoon with more of the same until quitting time. Evidently nobody did a walkthrough of the building and gave Allen a work order for it, so Jason and Brice spent the last bit of time there doing that. When I left work, I went home to my hot house and changed before going to Asurion to pick up Josh.

Somehow, Josh had avoided any spoilers from Endgame after all this time, so I was excited to take him to see it. We wanted to eat a little bit of something before the movie, so we went to Chipotle first and split a burrito. Then it was straight to the Cinemark in a perfect amount of time to grab our collectible posters and stow them in the car before finding our seats. We both made it through the entire movie without getting up, and even a little longer since we stayed for the extra scenes at the end. The movie of course was great, but I thought the extra clip was a bit lame. I wish we had gotten the one with Morgan Stark instead.

After the movie, we went to Old Chicago for a proper dinner, and then headed back home. I turned my portable A/C down super low to hopefully cool the house a bit overnight, and then headed up to Summer’s for the evening.

Everybody wants a happy ending, right? But it doesn’t always roll that way.

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The Long Exhaustion

It’s been getting hotter every day, which I think has people more lethargic and irritable. Amanda needed my help running some cable at the middle school in the morning, and when we got back, we heard some of the others had gotten into a yelling match while we were away. Jason ended up taking the afternoon off, but Ben finally returned after nearly two weeks away.

Gary and I went to Foodies for lunch, which was pretty decent but super expensive. The gyro I had was good, but for the price, I would have just gone to Arby’s. The rice was pretty good, but I think our favorite was the cheesy potatoes.

After lunch, I took Amanda to the junior high with me to hang out while I tried to pack up a few things to move out. After a while she got bored and we went to the middle school and did a couple things off of her cleanup list.

We ended the day at the shop a little early because power went out. Evidently it went out momentarily for over half of the city, but it seemed to come back pretty quickly. At first I thought it was something the construction crew did while filling in our parking hole they had dug.

I ran home to unload some things that had been in my trunk, then got a much needed car wash on the way to my parents’ house for dinner. Summer brought all the kids over after karate, and we had a mix of eggplant soup and spaghetti. I ate too much because of picky eaters, and then we all headed back to her house for the evening. The kids continued with their misguided dummy nonsense on into the night since I couldn’t inspire them to anything else, which was of great personal frustration.

Stymie to the moon…

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Bye Bye LeRoy

It was Dale’s last day of work today, but by the count of our accomplishments, we were all retiring today. Jason tried sending us all on a wild goose chase with phones, but then diverted us upstairs instead. I lead a group of three others in replacing telephones there, and basically did three of the six we found. By the end of it, I had to make Amanda do one herself. Gary split off first, and was followed by Brice soon after.

I had to run to Oakland to look at their fax machine, but made it right back so we could go to lunch. Jason used the scrap metal money we made to buy us all Dale’s choice of Brown’s Catfish. Gary, Amanda, Jason, Dale, and I were all that went, but it was a good time. Then after lunch we went to Sequoyah and dusted more computers until everyone sort of lost momentum again. We did encounter a dumpster scrapper back at the shop, who we invited in to take some old printers and CRT monitors. I’m not sure he’ll get much of anything for them, but at least we don’t have to mess with the junk any more.

We killed the rest of the afternoon at the shop while Dale mumbled about wanting to go home. I’m not sure anyone was really surprised, but we all wondered why he didn’t just leave anyway. When Jason finally did tell us we could leave early, he jumped up faster than I have ever seen anyone jump before. He handed me his keys and I forced a bro-hug on him, and Amanda walked out with him.

Gary and I went by Superfast to check out some cabling and other electronics they wanted to have relocated, and Ben offered to give him a free oil change while he was there. Afterward I went home to change and clean up a bit before running to the junior high for my tools and meeting Gary back at the shop. They had just closed, so Summer finished her stuff and then shut everything down so I could get to work.

The rat’s nest looked a lot worse than it really was, but it still took me a couple hours to get everything cleaned up and looking nice. There’s still more to do, but they still have some finishing work to do in the lobby first, and then I can come back and finish my part. I struggle a bit on how much to charge them for the work, but it’ll be really nice to make some extra money on the side. It’ll be good to bring a little bit of the hustle back.

When we got back to Summer’s for the evening, I fried some chicken strips and made some great looking salads for the three of us. Then we had dessert and watched an episode of Parks and Rec before bed.

“Highskoo’ Teknicken” and other Daleisms!

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Newtonian Roast

Dale and I delivered a couple of oversized televisions to James and Robin this morning, which felt ridiculous. I’m mostly concerned about setting the precedent. When we got back, we all spent the rest of the morning building more Chromebook carts while Brice rearranged the graveyard. I think we all basically took turns telling him how pointless that is, and then I spent a bunch of time sifting through stuff that was going out in the garbage. I don’t think we even broke $200 in scrap metal, which I expected. We would have made more by selling the miscellaneous power adapters by themselves, let alone all the other good electronics.

Allen wanted to try Newton’s Pharmacy for lunch, so he, Jason, Dale, and I went there and had the roast beef special. It was pretty good, but I thought my Oreo milkshake wasn’t quite cold or thick enough. At least it was relatively cheap and fast. Then Dale and I went to the high school after lunch to try and go over a last few things before he leaves for good in a couple of days.

After work, I stopped by Sonic to get a drink and free corn dog to surprise Summer at work. At first I thought the drive-through speaker volume was messed up, but then it became apparent that it was probably the girl on the headset that was speaking so quietly. It was also disturbing to see how many of the guys inside were looking to revive the grunge look. I think only two of the five or so people I saw looked like they had washed their hair this week.

I hung out in Summer’s office for just a few minutes before heading home for a while. It’s looking like I won’t have working air conditioning for another couple weeks, but this week has been cooler and more bearable anyway. Hopefully the sun chills out for a bit until my house is back online again.

Once Summer and Eaddie got home with some leftover pizza from her work meeting, I headed up for dinner. Then we watched an episode of Parks and Rec before bed.

Only the dirtiest of copper.

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Angry Turds

It was a peculiarly small crowd at work this morning. Gary was on a tear about having to come in over the weekend to replace door batteries every four hours because power was still out since yesterday, and the doors couldn’t lock without them. Jason came back in from somewhere and was in a pretty foul mood himself, presumably because he felt he was doing the lion’s share of the work and that this wasn’t fair.

We started out in the morning moving crap around in the warehouse for seemingly no purpose. “The shell game” is a phrase I keep hearing lately, and it’s ever so relevant. We moved things from boxes to other boxes. We unnecessarily cut cords off of power bricks to scrap the dirty copper and throw out the actual useful parts. We moved Chromebooks off of pallets and into another room, and were scolded for it without genuine cause. It was overall just a very aggravating morning.

Allen and Dale wanted to go to BFD for lunch again, so I drove us down there to eat. I ate way too much there, and the service was slow again. I still haven’t completely figured out their menu pricing, which is weird because of how electronic it is. The food was good though.

After lunch, Jason sent me with Dale and Amanda to re-mount a bunch of TVs in the halls of her middle school campus. The painters patched our holes, which made it difficult to re-mount them in the same place. We made it work though, in spite of the arm cramps I started getting. When we got back to the shop, we finished the day by wiring carts in the cafeteria, which at least had air conditioning.

When I got home, I cleaned up the bettas and fed them some mosquito larvae. I found a larger container to replace the smallest, so hopefully they’ll be a little happier. Then I spent most of the evening testing inCharge cables. I had a pretty bad ratio of 2:1 cables that wouldn’t charge my phone, which was stupid and aggravating, but it seems like they’ll warranty them without too much trouble.

Finally at Summer’s for the evening, I fancied-up her work email signature and pointed out the obvious flaws of publicizing her personal cell phone number. I can’t even believe nobody considered that.

Intelligence can be such a burden.

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How Am I Supposed to Breathe with No Air?

It hardly felt like friday after such a tough week. I came in half expecting to be able to run the show again, but Jason was there to mess with that. Somehow we convinced him to let us go home at lunch if we found all but at least 10 of the Chromebooks we were still missing. I spent the morning crunching numbers and directing people to campuses. Then Gary and I spent most of the morning at Dwight.

We got down to about 11 missing, and I think Amanda was the most upset about it. Evidently Allen saw Gary’s leftovers from BFD yesterday and decided that he had to have some of that for lunch today, so we took him and Jason down to try it. Our server was the only one there, and the place filled up really fast. He did his best to keep up, and did well at it, but it definitely felt like amateur hour for the owner to be working. I got the lunch special this time, but I think I ended up inadvertently convincing him to charge me extra for my drink. In any case, everyone loved it, but unfortunately nobody had time for dessert this time.

After lunch, Gary, Amanda, and I went to the junior high to try and track down a single Chromebook that likely shouldn’t have ever been on the campus. By the end of the day, we got down to nine serial numbers that weren’t accounted for, but a whopping 23% missing chargers. Jason was content to put that off until a later date rather than get a count of them now for some reason, so I gave up for the week.

We left work at 3, and I went home to start crunching numbers on my great air conditioner/heat pump debate. I lost count of how many hours I spent on it, but when I finally got up and went to my parents’ house, Dad convinced me that it just wasn’t worth it for a super high SEER unit. I still think I’ll go for a heat pump, but probably get one with a split gas furnace as well.

I left after eating some spaghetti and headed to Summer’s, where I flailed past a porch light of swarming bugs and into a sauna of no air conditioning. At first I thought it might be the filter, because I’ve always noticed it looking super dirty. I struggled to pull it away from the wall because it was so clogged, but that wasn’t the issue. Outside, the compressor wasn’t running either. Autumn and I ran to Walmart to try and find a replacement filter so we wouldn’t look like such jackasses for having such a filthy one, but they were completely out. I had Autumn call her grandparents to see if she could go back there for the evening, and then dropped her off before meeting Summer at my parents’ house.

We didn’t stay up long, but she did have to lay and marvel at the glowing things in my old bedroom for a bit. I’m running out of alternative air conditioned sleeping arrangements, so I guess it’s time to bite the bullet.

Why is the heat following me around?

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Big Fuggin Dessert

We lacked any real leadership today, so those of us that were left mostly finished the task of collecting Chromebooks. We got a ton at Sequoyah before lunch, but ran out of chargers part of the way through. It took us a while to get an answer for what to do from there, but eventually we were told to just send them on without chargers. I figure we can find most of the chargers we need to ship back, but some will come out at the end of these leases.

Gary, Dale, and I went to Bocadillo’s Frozen Desserts for lunch, and it was both amazing and expensive. The lunch specials seem pretty great, so I’ll have to leverage that next time. Otherwise, we could feed the family with the CheatMeal for a day or two. To cap off my assortment of tacos, I had a mangonada that was to die for. It was truly perfect.

After lunch, we finished up with Oakland, where I had to weave around through the cramped aisles where all the rooms had been gutted for carpet cleaning. We ended up missing about 50 Chromebooks somewhere, but some of the guys think they forgot to check the Upper Elementary 5th Grade library.

When I finally left work, I ran home to take care of the fish before heading to my parents’ house for a swim. I wasn’t super hungry, but by the time Summer got there and swam around a bit, we had enough room for some spaghetti. On the way out, we got to see a skunk in the cat food. It didn’t seem too bothered, or even aware that I had come outside, but I was too chicken to get very close. Maybe next time.

Anyone that knows me would know it doesn’t matter if I have a use for it.