Category: Work

Some Fucking Bullshit

So last Thursday I mailed a package. New hire; needed to be there next-day. But it was in Phoenix, so I chose express shipping. Because, you know, it takes less than a day to drive a package 9 miles.

Today I find out it hasn't arrived yet, so I pull up tracking. And I see this goddamn fucking bullshit:

Package Not Due for Delivery

The package is sitting in a fucking warehouse for three days, because I did not pay extra for next-day delivery. This is a thing that FedEx does now.

They've got the package. They've got it all set to put it on a truck and take it to its destination. But if you don't pay for next-day delivery, they won't deliver it next-day, no matter how short a distance it's going.

I guess what I'm saying is, support your local post office.

What Sticks With You

At the company I'm working for, temps' keycards get automatically disabled every six months.

It's a rote thing and I know how it works by now, but it still raises the hairs on the back of my neck. I've got a visceral reaction to coming in and finding myself locked out, something left over from the job last year where I just came in one morning (a 30-mile drive for a 6 AM report time) and they told me I'd been fired.

I know that was an anomaly. I've only ever been fired from that one job; it was a fluke, and by now I know about the security procedures here and can think of things like "Oh, it's the first day of the month that marks one year I've been here? Yeah, that sounds like an expiration date."

But even though I know, calmly and rationally, that it's no big deal and I just need to go up to the front desk and get my account reinstated (and damn it, the guys I work for now are decent human beings and wouldn't do that to me), I still get that sinking feeling in my stomach; maybe it is happening again.

As traumas go, I suppose getting fired from a crappy temp job is a pretty minor one. But it definitely left an impression with me.

Never a Dull Moment

Today's adventure: trying to figure out how to get two rather large pallets of networking equipment from the curb to the NOC. Without a pallet jack.

But hey, at least it was only 99 degrees out.

Garbage

Dear everybody who has ever mailed me back a filthy keyboard,

I don't mail you my garbage for you to throw away.

Maybe someday I'll just mail a user a half-eaten sandwich. Here, have some disgusting trash.

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Bright Side of Life

You know, I spend a lot of time complaining about stupid users. So let me take a moment to thank the smart ones.

If you have ever packed something appropriately, so that it's properly cushioned and doesn't bounce around, thank you.

If you have gotten it in the mail as soon as it was ready to go so that I didn't have to call and remind you, thank you.

If you made sure that all your stuff was properly backed up so that I didn't have to dig your computer out of a stack weeks later, thank you!

If you haven't shipped a horrific, toxic-looking keyboard back for me to dispose of for you, seriously, thank you so much.

And if you've actually thought to wipe down your equipment before shipping it back, I could kiss you.

Really. I got an old computer back today that somebody actually took a minute to clean first and it legitimately made my day.

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Boxes are Hard.

It's vexed me for years and years that end users seem unable to comprehend very simple things like what a Web browser is, the difference between Windows and Office, and how to come up with effective search terms to type into Google.

In more recent years, I have come to understand that, for some of these people, simply putting a thing in a box and affixing a label to it is a nigh-impossible process.

Today I received a desktop computer that was just thrown into a box with no padding whatsoever -- a current model and redeployable (well, maybe not anymore) -- and an old, past-end-of-life laptop packed inside of multiple boxes and wrapped in layer after layer of bubble wrap with tape. The former shipped from out-of-state, while the latter came from an office two blocks away from mine. Would be nice if they could work out some sort of happy medium.

Two weeks ago I missed a day of work with a migraine. The day after that I scrambled and played catchup and shipped two days' worth of computers in one day. Turnaround time from shipping a new computer to receiving the old one is right about two weeks, so today I was hit with two days' worth of returns in one day.

And okay, I've spent enough of this post complaining about stupid users that I'll take a moment and acknowledge my own stupid fuckup of the day.

I had a giant pile of boxes in front of me and a small pile of outbound machines, and I started to stress out about it a little. And I made a mistake.

I took a break from processing returns to ship a machine out, and I got my wires crossed and started going through the return process. I deleted a user's old computer and its access group from ActiveDirectory, before shipping her replacement. And since I don't have access to fix that, I had to ask my coworker to take care of it.

It's about that time I decided I should probably take some deep breaths and try to relax before doing anything else -- not just for fear of more sloppy mistakes, but because if I'm not careful I'll give myself another migraine, and then I'll just be going through this same song and dance again in a couple weeks.

Still opted not to take a break right away -- because that just means more crap I gotta do tomorrow -- but I slowed down a bit. Got through maybe half the stack, finally got enough facefuls of dust from old Dells that I decided to call it quits for the day.

So, more to do tomorrow. But I guess that's the closest thing a temp ever gets to job security.

YUMI

Had a spot of trouble with a hard drive at work today and decided to see what thumb drive Linux is like these days. I found a program called YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer) at pendrivelinux.com and discovered that it's pretty great.

YUMI is a simple Windows executable. It's got a long list of Linuxes -- Ubuntus, Fedoras, server OS's like CentOS, small OS's like Damn Small Linux and Puppy, and non-Linuxes like FreeDOS, as well as special-purpose diagnostic software like Ultimate Boot CD and various AV vendors' recovery discs.

Click on one of the supported OS's, point YUMI at an ISO, and it'll install it on your thumb drive -- as many as will fit, with GRUB to select which one you want at boot time. Better still, if you don't have an ISO, it's got a one-click download for every single one of them.

And while it's got dozens of supported OS's built in, it'll do arbitrary bootable ISO's, too; I tried two and found that one (the latest FreeDOS installer) worked while the other (Hitachi Drive Fitness Test) did not.

As for Puppy, it's definitely seen some progress in the years since I last used it but my gripes remain much the same: instead of programs being labeled by name, they have generic descriptions (hypothetically a good idea for neophyte users who don't know what Seamonkey is, but in practice I think "Web" would probably be a better name than "Browse"), and the package management system is less than entirely intuitive. Still, for coming in around 100MB it's a damned impressive, and a whole lot easier on the eyes than the last time I tried it.

Anyway, YUMI's made it easy enough to set up that you can easily spend a couple hours (or more) screwing around with various USB bootkits. It's an impressive piece of software and one I'll definitely be keeping in my admin toolkit.

(There appears to be a Linux equivalent called Multisystem LiveUSB Tool. I haven't tried it out yet so I can't vouch for it, but if you're looking for, you know, a Linux tool for Linux, that might be something to check out.)

Migraine

Stayed home from work today with a migraine. One of the worst of my damn life -- no nausea with this one, fortunately, at least, not at first, but just this awful skull-crushing agony as if a thousand Thetans were pounding at the inside of my skull trying to ec-scape.

Woke me up at about 3:15 AM, too, which to the best of my recollection is a first. I've often woken up in the morning with a migraine, but seldom in the middle of the night. I was covered in sweat, too; don't know if that's some new and exciting feature of the migraine, or if I was running a fever, or just because I live in Tempe, Arizona and it is June and our lows are around 80 degrees this time of year.

Got up at 6, called in, popped a prescription migraine pill (with codeine!), and went back to bed for a fitful in-and-out-of-consciousness "sleep" until about 11 AM.

(Tangentially: I had a job, a couple of years ago, where some middle-management fuckwit had the bright idea of combining the sick line with the help desk. One day I called in and, hours later, got a call from work asking where the hell I was -- I explained that I'd called in, but apparently the help desk hadn't gotten around to my ticket yet. I came in the next day to discover that my ticket had finally been submitted at 4:45 PM, which, as you might suppose, is not the optimal time to let an office know that a worker will not be coming in today. Like, I think by 4:45, they've probably worked that out.

Best of all, I was then randomly selected to fill out a survey about how satisfied I was with my interaction with the help desk.

I made a point of not raking the tech over the coals -- I noted that help desk techs have a lot on their plate and often poor mechanisms for prioritizing their tickets; if you've ever worked help desk I don't need to tell you that nobody ever submits a ticket as low- or medium-priority -- and said that trying to combine the sick line with the help desk line was a fundamentally bad idea.)

Anyway. Ate some instant ramen, washed another codeine down with a few cups of coffee, and that managed to knock the headache down from "I can barely move" to "dull, ever-present throbbing". And I don't know if it was the codeine, the caffeine, or the pain, but by this point my coordination was completely shot.

Then I fired up the ol' Nintendo.

There's something I learned, around the age of 12 or 13: playing video games helps with the pain.

My mom and my grandparents didn't really buy that, and I suppose under the circumstances I can't blame them -- I was, after all, saying I had a migraine, and then staying home from school and playing video games all day.

But now there's research backing what I understood intuitively as a child: video games have an anesthetic effect. In recent years there have been studies in distraction therapy suggesting that video games have a real and measurable impact on pain management. (For one example: Applications of virtual reality for pain management in burn-injured patients, via the NIH, 2009. There have been other studies besides.)

I find that quieter games tend to be a bit better. And games that don't have a lot of text, because reading makes my head hurt.

I also tend to gravitate toward the familiar, stuff from when I was a kid -- Super Mario World and the like -- and I suspect there's a "comfort food" aspect to this. Though, on the other hand, SMW requires twitch reflexes, and when my reflexes are scrambled by codeine and caffeine it can be a much more frustrating game -- which doesn't help with pain.

Knowing that, today I started with Xenoblade. It's not too heavy on the text, I'm over-leveled enough that it's pretty low-key and not difficult or frustrating, and it doesn't require much in the way of hand-eye coordination or precise movements. (Well, most of it doesn't. Fuck you, Valak Mountain.)

But what it does have is big, vertigo-inducing vistas. Fuck. I was about three minutes in before I started getting nauseous and had to turn it off. Don't know if that's the migraine or the codeine, but I popped a motion sickness pill and decided to try Super Mario World after all.

I picked up my save from the last time I had a migraine and worked my way through Twin Bridges. So I guess my reflexes weren't completely shot.

Then I had a hot bath.

Now here's a question: what the fuck is up with bathtubs?

The standard American bathtub is a rectangle, and it's, what, four and a half, five feet long? And its deepest point is where your fucking feet go.

Who came up with that shit?

I'm actually kinda curious: were bathtubs designed this way because of the belief that baths are for children and teeny-tiny elfin women, or is it that only children and teeny-tiny elfin women take baths because no average-sized human adult can fucking fit in one comfortably?

Decided not to shave afterward. Still jittery. Just because I have the wherewithal to abandon Yoshi to a tragic fate on my way to Soda Lake doesn't mean I trust myself to run sharp objects across my face.

Anyhow. Guess my point is, "staying home playing video games" isn't always as much fun as it sounds. Sometimes it doesn't mean you're slacking. Sometimes it means you're doing everything you can to deal with excruciating pain.

All things considered I'd much rather have gone to work. Because aside from the "excruciating pain" thing, I don't get sick pay, and I'll spend tomorrow playing catchup.

So it goes, I guess.

Seriously, I Wanna Know

Dear Every Single Person Who Has Ever Stuck a Label onto the Outside of a Reusable Shipping Sleeve,

What the fuck is the matter with you?

Kisses,
T