Moving Day

Last Thursday I had to pack up everything from the Cube of Hate^® thanks to a change of offices which I'll enumerate in a later post. This took me two days. I threw out a lot of crap and still managed to fill five large boxes. Another two were stuffed with MSDN CDs and DVDs. If you have old MSDN media, don't throw anything away. Not even the Everything Subscriptions can access NT4 or Win2K among other deprecated software. This is a problem when you need to load up, say, Windows NT 4 SP3 Greek for a weird problem that a customer is having. Luckily for said customer I'm a pack rat and had both NT4 GRE and the SP3 CD.

Friday was a Day of Tremendous Waste about which I also have a bit to say. Luckily I'd printed out enough Evil-level Sudokus to keep me busy between the various rounds of break food we got.

It didn't take me too long to find the new building this morning; finding my spot was even easier. Along with my seven boxes of crapola, someone had decided that all the lab machines belonged to me. Heavy rack-mount Suns and a 4-way Netfinity that used to belong to Education, and old single-proc Netfinity and more. All mine!

I'm requisitioning a few long power cords because I'm already overloading the electrical sockets I'm allotted and so I have to steal juice from my more normal cow-orkers who manage to do their work with only one or two machines.

The 4U Sun StorEDGE may or may not be working; it's definitely not going to go back into a rack any time soon. The fuckwit movers dropped it. The rackmount panels are replaceable but I can't switch the thing on until I've had time to look inside, so that's our Sun storage out until next week at the earliest.

I got my workstations rebuilt and running, ripping out the damned CapLock key from fresh, clean keyboards (on which I have to write 40 or so macro reminders above the Fnn keys). A mail check showed me most of my tickets had been updated and the customers were screaming like hungry seals for my fishy responses.

There was another mail, much more ominous...

I was always against the total consolidation of the main lab machines, not just because I loved having all that hardware close-by (and we were more flexible as a result), but because there are too many points of failure with centralised machines. Like telecomms. Or power. Our UK center has lost comms a few times and -- despite dual independent feeds -- electricity not once but twice. But it gets worse.

Over the weekend there was a fire. In the datacenter.

The worst is yet to come.

I no longer even have a cube. I sit at a big, wide, deep desk, the back half of which is unusable. The general office layout is still cube-like, but I no longer have any walls on which to precariously balance and stack reams of paper and shield me from the other monkeys.

At least I got to keep my red stapler19" CRT set to 1600x1200 only because the crappy Compaq on-board video can't handle more. I may yet buy a graphic card for this machine. Any recommendations on cheap cards for non-gaming environments which do ultra-high resolution at high frequency would be appreciated. Everyone else was forced to trade in the CRT for a 19" HP L1940T LCD which can only do 1280x1024 despite having a physically larger screen. I need my real estate; it's good to be buddies with IT.

So I sit here at $MegaCorp waiting for the overlords to sort out the problems they're having getting me into the system. The system chokes on my name. I see many benefits to this: I'm free to take care of all my other unpacking/reconnecting and all my other cow-orkers are figuring out the hard way which system changes are actually necessary. This will become common knowledge once it comes time for me to switch over my own boxes.

I closed another very bloggable ticket today; it should be up next week. I've already started work on the new my-head-shaped-dent, but I miss the form-fitting comfort of the old one which was almost deep enough to prepare a bag of ramen in.

x-posted from HuSi.