My phone didn’t wake me up in the morning. This was a good sign – there were no fires causing my coworkers to wake me up. Ordinarily I’m take-it-or-leave-it with hotel breakfast, but knowing that it’s something that causes my mother an oddly high level of ecstasy, I took a few moments to get coffee and one of those DIY Belgian waffles before I headed back to work.
There were a few things that needed to be addressed; some users were a bit confused regarding where certain things were, and e-mail needed to be configured, but for the most part, everyone was where they wanted to be in less than 90 minutes. There was some additional back-end work I needed to do, but today’s big job was upgrading everyone’s RAM and giving them Solid State Hard Drives. Once again, this would require some after hours work, and I couldn’t even start the process on the unattended computers because “Santa” (aka FedEx) hadn’t arrived with the parts yet. So, I went back to the hotel, made a phone call, and took a nap.
My arrival back at the office led me to meet some surprising wildlife: iguanas. Big ones. One easily three feet long. Geckos, I expected. The huge lizards…not so much, but it was nice to see. Work started up again, and this time, I *was* able to do things in parallel. I thought I was going to get out at a reasonable hour! …but while I had the first half of the computers done in two hours, the others were…less cooperative. Some just took an oddly long time, some involved an attempted drive clone and a subsequent failure…there was chaos. So, I got all the easy ones done, and went out for some sushi before round two began.
I took some time to reply to some text messages I’d been neglecting to return. It was nice to catch up with some people. The sushi was fine, but I was surprised at the tab. An upcharge for soy paper is common, but three bucks a roll? That was more than I’d expected. The outdoor dining was nearly perfect in its weather, and I enjoyed the outing.
Back to the grindstone, and the last three computers would take another four hours to finish their installs. I was glad none of the drives failed in the process – two of them gave the sort of feedback indicating that the drives were likely to fail soon, so I’m glad I thought to do this. All of the computers came back up the way they were supposed to, making me pretty confident that the next day would involve a very minimal amount of work. Back to the hotel, back to sleep.
