Tag: work

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Idiot Wrangler

I made myself an iced coffee this morning, and then I was sent with Kyle and Brody to strip out the computer lab at Sequoyah. It was a short run to the closet, so pulling the cable out was a relative piece of cake. They were both working with earbuds in, so I went along with it and listened to Weird Al all morning. By the time we finished up, it had sprinkled a bit on the stuff in the truck bed, but it was likely all going to scrap anyway.

We finished unloading the truck in time for lunch, so Kyle drove me over to central office to see what the guys there wanted to eat. Someone suggested Stoby’s, and then we all volunteered Kyle to drive us. Somehow we made it to and from the restaurant without incident. I went light with tuna on a toasted croissant, and then took my chips for later.

We spent the afternoon finishing up termination at central office. It felt at times that we were underprepared, but Zach was happy to make trips back for parts we needed. It certainly could have been done more efficiently, but it wasn’t too embarrassing with all of the admins out at their retreat. As we finished up, I learned that one of the girls over there was married to Jackson, our old family friend from years ago.

I was the last one out of the admin building, and as I was walking into the shop, Kyle was walking back from the truck pen with a shit-eating grin, and said he may or may not have wrecked the truck trying to back it into the pen. I never made it over to look at the damage, but evidently it ran the length of the truck and left a pretty good dent. That frustrated basically everyone there with any goddamn sense. Zach let us go home early, but I think all but two of us actually stayed until Thomas showed back up from the retreat, and then they went to inspect the truck and damaged fence post.

I left and went to my parents’ house to clean up some leftovers for dinner. Mom wasn’t home from work yet, so Dad and I chatted until she showed up. Then we ate and I sat around for a bit before heading home. Summer hit the gym before going home, so I took her some Taco Bell, and we called it an early night.

“At least nobody died,” is not as comforting to hear as you may think.

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Basic White Mexican

Gary had Jacob and me go upstairs to swap out some lab computers this morning. We knocked that out pretty quickly, but then Gary had to leave the two of us to install the Pearson VUE software The instructions were both Dale-level documentation, and printed. I could have probably deciphered them well enough, except that some of the instructions were out of order, or completely wrong. It took us the entire day to get everything running.

We had to give up at lunch time, and Gary and I met Zach, Greg, and his wife at the new La Chiqita, or as the menu said, “L C I L A C H I Q U I T A” in all capital, equally-spaced letters. The restaurant itself was a small, open dining area with relatively tightly-placed tables. The décor could be perfectly described as “basic white bitch,” down to the grassy wall and cursive name in the entryway. Just when it feels like we’ve reached peak Mexican restaurant saturation, another one pops up with the exact same menu. It was novel 20 years ago. Now I’m just annoyed that no other ethnicity appears to even be trying.

I finished up the lab in the afternoon, and then tried to trace down a dead line with Gary at the end of the day. Things got pretty quiet around the office, and I appeared to be the last one out the door right at quitting time. I went home until Mom called me over to finish up some rice soup.

We ate and chatted for a little bit, and then I went back home to meet Summer after she got in from work. She ate my leftover lunch in the floor, then got ready for bed. Eaddie called, citing boredom, but seemed to have a lot going on in the background. As I suspected, Autumn has been terrible, and has continued to steal technology to circumvent her punishment. The lack of action against her is beyond frustrating, and I’m ready to lash out.

Beat it, just beat it.

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Feeling Weird

I hardly slept last night after getting up at least every hour, and once with a charley horse in my left leg. I was surprised that I wasn’t dragging out of bed when I finally got up for work. Zach was going to have me image some computers, but we were mistaken in thinking they had already arrived. Evidently all of the boxes that were in the hallway were just monitors and stands. Instead, I went with Greg to re-wire all of central office for their remodel. Jacob joined us for just a little while, and then Zach showed up near the end, just as we were finishing up a dozen lines pulled across the length of the building before lunch.

I worked up a little headache from the heat in that building and working in the insulation, so I decided to take a half sick day to go home and clean up a bit. Eventually I made it up to Summer’s, and we headed to Conway first to eat. We shared a sandwich at Firehouse, then went to Splash so she could check on a vehicle that managed to leave without enough oil. Once she had cleared that there was no major damage, we continued on our journey.

We made one more stop at Best Buy to look at appliances before heading to Little Rock. Without any real plan, we went to McCain Mall and wandered around the sad skeleton of the 80s. Then we wound up at Red Lobster for dinner before our show. We were in and out of there pretty fast, so we decided to stop by the nearby Splash for another carwash before driving across town to The Robinson Center.

Traffic was a bit nuts, and it took us a while to get into the parking garage. The light never gave us a green arrow to turn, and the guy at the head of the line wasn’t making any effort to jump the light, so I ended up circling the block to come back the other direction. It still took us a while, but we eventually made it and happened to park right next to Daniel and a bunch of his crew. We made our way inside and up to the top level where we could find our box seats. It was a little awkward staring down at that angle, but having actual movable chairs was far superior to being seated in the narrow theater seats with that crowd. We could see the average girth made for some super awkward seating below.

The show was absolutely incredible, and we even liked Emo Philips in the opening act. I was worried that his wandering falsetto would be annoying, but the jokes were great. Once the band took to the stage, we learned that Jim West, the guitarist, was having to play from backstage due to a positive COVID test. It was cool that he was still well enough to participate, and the show didn’t really suffer for it.

I was surprised how many songs I actually did know, but there were a few that were totally unfamiliar. I was surprised they had so much lighting, since I assumed it would mostly be acoustic or really low-key stuff. It played like a rock concert, but the band did several different genre twists on a bunch of the songs. At the end, they wandered around obviously on stage and then came back for an encore that was a mashup of a whole bunch of songs, and it was awesome.

Being a relatively smaller crowd, we were able to get our merch after the show, and then pull out of the parking garage in a relatively reasonable amount of time. We made it home before midnight, and it was off to bed as quickly as we could get there.

Boy, what a joker. What a funny, funny guy!

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Improper Sendoff

I took the Grom to work today, as fast as I could. We met for a short meeting, and then almost all of us went to Oakland to remove the computer lab. At first it was Brody and me, but soon we were joined by Kyle and Zach. We loaded the computers and peripherals into the truck, and then pulled most of the network lines out of the ceiling. Jacob eventually showed up for the last part, and he and I finished up as the others unloaded the truck.

That pretty well got us to lunch, and I was excited to hear Kyle suggest Ridgewood Brothers. Jacob joined us again, as he’s started to have lunch with us occasionally. It was a relatively short line, though still slow. I chatted with Grant a little, and then Robert gave me some extra ribs with my order. We came back to the shop to eat, and that was pretty much it for the day. Central Office let everyone go at 2:30, so we just hung out in the shop the rest of the afternoon.

When I got home, Summer said the girls were leaving with their father, so I eventually made it up to their house to see them off. I thought I might retain Autumn, but in the end, Nick didn’t even come to the house. He just pulled up and honked for them, and they left.

Summer and I finished up the leftover ribs from lunch, and then she watched TV as I burned the rest of an absolutely beautiful day doing nothing. I finished up some Bird Dog in frustration, and then it was off to bed early, but not before Summer.

We’re burning daylight. I’d rather be sailing.

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Watching Paint Dry

We had a meeting this morning to learn about our new ticketing system, but after a couple hours, I realized that I didn’t even have access to most of the things that were demoed to us. Thomas is annoyingly restrictive of permissions. By the time the conference call was over, I had synced my mental clock with the lady’s Eastern timeclock, and thought it was lunch time.

An hour later, five of us went to La Chiquita. They talked about a new one, but I wasn’t even aware they were building one. Evidently I’ve been passing it on the way to and from Summer’s, but still had no idea it existed. The service wasn’t great, but the food was alright. It felt a little like they had just sent half of their staff to the new place, so the original place was slow to do anything.

The afternoon was mostly quiet. I spent most of it to myself, changing settings on hotspots for Thomas to take to the admin retreat that’s on a farm in the middle of nowhere with no technology.

After work, I went home to switch for the Shadow and then rode up north to Sandy’s to help set up their printer. We never reset the computer she got from her brother, and I had a hunch it was having trouble just with everything that was already loaded on the computer. It took a couple hours, but we had a great conversation, and it was really nice to visit.

On the way home, I stopped by to see Summer. She was having a really hard time with getting Autumn to mow, but I think that was mostly frustration with the mower itself. They’ve always just left everything out in the open to get rained on, and their gas always goes bad. She finally dumped her fuel can out onto the lawn and went to get some fresh, and Autumn was able to finish up as I left.

At home, I just tried to finish up for the evening as quickly as possible. My Google Nest Hub in the kitchen appeared to lock up, but I didn’t have time to contact support. Between it and Google Fi not giving me the bill credit for the SIM that I activated last week, I’m not having a great time with Google.

Dust ’em.

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If It Fits, It Ships

I got to kind of take the lead again today with the lease return, and we ended up getting the whole thing out the door much earlier than anyone else expected. I like to think I had a big part in driving that, especially near the end. It took us three trips to The UPS Store today, but I even managed to assemble a packing slip with a 1:1 match for serial number replacements.

Ryan was in town to visit, and Thomas, Gary, Greg, and I went to Brangus for lunch with him. I filled up on peanuts and then only ate half of my potato, so I took the rest home for dinner. The afternoon was pretty quiet, though my office got pretty popular for a little while.

I also got my contract for next year, but it was wrong again. They had me on the Tech 1 pay scale, so I sent it back for review. I wrapped up for the day and headed home for the evening. I didn’t feel super, and was pretty tired after the day at work. I poked around the house and cleaned up a little bit, and then it was off to bed on time.

Trip down Memory Road

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Insanity

The shop was quiet when I got to work today. Zach had other things to do, so I spent the morning running around with Greg. I had him take me to The UPS Store to pick up our boxes, and then we went to the middle school to give them to Josh. Jacob was there helping him sort devices, and we walked out with several boxes of good devices to ship. From there, we went back to the shop to load up some more, and took them all to The UPS Store.

When we finished with that running around, we continued to check devices in the graveyard for any that we could ship back. Jacob came out to help for a bit until lunch, when the three of us and Thomas went to Slim Chickens. My wrap took a while to come out because the fries were fresh, and they were delicious because of it.

When we got back, Greg and I went to Oakland to check on an intercom issue, and then went to look at the new jumbotron at the high school. They angled it poorly, so it’s basically impossible to see from the visitors side. I’d love to see who at Ace Signs is connected to someone in the district, because we’ve literally never been happy with anything they’ve ever done for us.

I was a little scattered for the remainder of the afternoon. Thomas came back for a minute just to hide, and I spent some time working on a few different things for others. I ended the day mostly in spreadsheets.

Summer called to let me know that she had let Autumn go into the high school by herself to drop something off, and of course Autumn had to show off the minor bruising she had after last night’s showdown. DHS called while they were all at the gym, so Summer took her right over to close out the case again. Another day; nothing learned.

I got roped into picking up Eaddie and Zane from the arcade and brought them up to Summer’s for dinner. I hadn’t really eaten much, but still felt full. I wanted to make Autumn skip a meal, but that didn’t happen. We just sat there, and I ate after everyone was done.

Eaddie had a meeting at the junior high about a band trip to Hawaii. It felt like I was in a timeshare meeting, and very little useful information was provided until we got the final handout at the end of the meeting. At $3k per person in a room of four, I’m not sure how bad of a deal it is. They’re certainly not making up for it in meals, and most of the excursions were an extra fee on top of that. As we left, Autumn was acting like she would be with us for some goddamn reason.

We dropped Zane off at home, and then I took the girls home. As I started to leave, Summer wanted to talk, so I stood there a while with her before heading home. There, I fought with a Fi rep about a promotion I’m not receiving for a SIM card that I purchased with real money. It seems like disappointment is all I know in nearly every aspect right now.

This is not the grail you’re looking for.

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uBreakiFix

After last night’s back and forth, I still wasn’t really ready for what today would bring. Eaddie was supposed to go out on her bicycle, but evidently went out with Autumn and their grandparents for most of the day instead. I took the Shadow to work since it was a lot cooler out. Fortunately I never saw any rain, though the forecast was pretty wishy-washy about it anyway.

When I first got settled in, I didn’t think I had much to do, but that changed quickly. The morning flew by as I prepared for the lease return for the big project of the day. Lunch time even snuck up on me, and I went to La Huerta with the holy trinity.

After lunch, we had to go back through all of our lease returns and check for damage and power, and then scan them one last time onto a return list to take to The UPS Store. We sent Brody and Kyle to deliver our first truckload, and they failed to bring the boxes back to us as I explicitly instructed. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because Brody also took an unscanned box of laptops along with the rest, so we ended up having to go back to The UPS Store to hunt those down.

At the end of the day, I noticed Autumn had looked up information on fixing a phone, so I had a suspicion that a friend had given her an old one to use. I rode home and then called Summer to discuss options. She went home to await her parents, who were bringing the girls back home. Autumn wanted to stay with them while Summer took Eaddie to the gym.

Summer was supposed to come by my house first to return Autumn’s sneakily-kept school laptop, but forgot after picking up Zane, so she dropped the two of them off to work out and then came over. There, I was able to get in to see a live conversation between Autumn and one of the boys she’s been talking to. That got her heated, and she was ready to throw down. I sent her to the gym so I could snoop some more, and eventually I headed up to their house to await their return home.

They were super late getting home, but Summer dropped Zane off, got Autumn from the grandparents’ house, and finally made it in. She immediately confronted Autumn about the phone, which was actually Eaddie’s old iPhone with a broken screen. That turned into a standoff, with Autumn basically taunting us because I guess she didn’t think we could break her.

Summer’s never really had to be hard on the girls. Eaddie’s always been relatively good, but Autumn has been going down a really bad path for a while now, and this required hard action that she just wasn’t fully prepared to take. We got through it though, between wall squats and kneeling with her arms out. Autumn continued to backtalk for a stupidly long time, to the point that even Eaddie was able to perfectly articulate something really inspiring. I was super proud of her for coming into the conversation in a truly meaningful way.

At the end of it all, I think we found a few honest ones among the crocodile tears. Autumn actually ran a hot bubble bath for Eaddie, and then went to bed. Then she came out in tears and said she needed a hug, and fell right into my arms, crying into my shoulder. She apologized in a way that I hadn’t heard from her before, and asked again that I continue with strict structure. Summer got her hug and apologies too, but there’s no telling how long it will last. She went to bed feeling terrible, but I was proud of her for sticking up to the bully in the house.

The Captain’s Log is the log that I use to beat you if you talk back to me again.

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The Existential Review: Year 6

I finally got back on a bike today, and rode the Shadow to work. I knew we had eSCO coming to pick up some more stuff to recycle, but I didn’t have any other real need to haul anything around. Gary split us up into three pairs, and Kyle and I were on a mission to do the work orders Gary hadn’t had time to address. It ended up not being very much, and Kyle really did all the legwork by going upstairs to install Microsoft Office on a Mac.

As soon as we finished up with that, we headed up to the graveyard to make a path to get everything onto the box truck. I convinced the guys to back up to the corner of the dock like they had done in the past, and it made things quite a bit easier. We still have a lot more carts to go, but we can almost see the end of the tunnel.

Lunchtime came around pretty quickly, and Gary decided on Wendy’s. I rode separately to get some bike time, and Zach surprised us there while he was on his week of vacation. Even a bunch of the maintenance guys walked in behind us. We had a good chat and had some time to chill before going back to work.

The afternoon was really quiet. We had to unbox the rest of our new Lenovo Chromebooks to confirm that they wouldn’t auto-update. Then I mostly just hung out in the shop until my one-on-one review time with Thomas. I thought Gary and Zach would be in on it, but it was just Thomas. He ranked me higher than I think Ben had ever ranked mee before – even higher than I had ranked myself, and had some really nice things to say, so I was quite happy. In the end it doesn’t do much for me, but it did give me some additional confidence.

He let everyone leave a few minutes early for the weekend, but I trailed out a bit late as I often do. Eaddie was still out with Maristella, so I went home to start on some more laundry until Summer got home from the gym. Eaddie rode in on her bike just a few minutes after Summer, and we went to Taco Villa for dinner. Eaddie and I both had taco salads, and both of our shells were way undercooked and chewy.

I had ridden the Grom behind them so Eaddie and I could go straight to the high school to practice riding after we ate. She was fussy about it like she always is, but I tried to press her on until she really seemed to just be unable to focus. She still wanted to go for a night ride on the R1 though, so we went home and swapped, and I took her for a big loop around town. I was pretty exhausted when we made it back to the house, so we put everything up and headed up to their house for the night. Summer was already in bed, and I didn’t waste much time finding my way there as well.

Yes, I keep repeating the same things over and over again because you are repeatedly doing none of those things.

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Cartagain Weather III: Certified Pre-Owned

I had completely forgotten that we were delivering carts to Oakland today. I made it in to work, and Gary had Greg, Josh, and Jacob ready to roll. He went to the middle school to scan Chromebooks while the rest of us loaded up the trailer for two trips to Oakland. I got pretty sweaty already, just from the humidity. There was a small chance of rain, but we never saw any.

By the time we finished, everyone was ready for lunch with still an hour to go. We met up with Gary, who had discovered a bunch of the Chromebooks we need to return this summer. I sat down to verify how he was checking his devices, and discovered that I had somehow made a mistake on our original sheet, and we hadn’t been correctly identifying devices the whole time. That meant re-scanning every device in the graveyard.

We loaded some scrap into the trailer, then headed back to the shop for lunch. We picked up Thomas and went to Fat Daddy’s in London. For some reason we always end up there on Thursdays, which is an awful day for specials. I had a pulled pork sandwich, which was edible enough, and fortunately a bit larger than I expected.

When we got back to the shop, I built a new scanning sheet from scratch, then joined Josh and Greg in the graveyard to re-scan devices. We made a pretty good dent in them before we ran out of boxes. It was also about time to head to the Center for our end-of-the-year pat-on-the-back.

With new leadership, this was the shortest event I had ever seen. The whole thing took like 15 minutes, which was insane. We only recognized retirees and the teachers of the year, which was kind of lame, but I guess at least we had an excuse to leave early. Ben called me in the middle of it, and said he was passing through town. Everyone else took off, but I waited there for him, and we ended up chatting for a while until they closed the place down. Tina came around with some plastic bags for the leftover cookies, and let us take a bunch home.

I started on laundry when I got home. Eaddie had been out on her bike all day, and ended up never coming back home. She called a few times to check in, which was good. After going back and forth about it, she decided she wanted to stay the night with a friend, so eventually I had to run some clothes to her.

On the way, I stopped for a couple 50 cent corndogs from Sonic, and a large order of onion rings. After I left, I realized my bag only had three onion rings in it, so I wound up going back after I delivered Eaddie’s stuff. One of the girls ran out with a new order of onion rings for me, and said they knew what they had done, and were just waiting for me to come back. I wish they had been able to just call me to let me know.

I ended the late night just barely missing my goal of washing all of my shirts. I’ve got a performance review at work tomorrow, so I didn’t want to be up too late finishing up, so I left the last load for the weekend.