Morning

I spent most of my morning at work cleaning up a lab close to my office. The big boss comes by at 08:00 sharp and tells me he needs my help because I'm so close to the lab. He would have probably grabbed me any way, but it was a nice line.

The cleaning consisted of tarring down an entire lab full of ramshackle computers and replacing them all along the shelves. We even cut the zip ties from power strips and rerouted them. We got rid of some old computes. That is, I put them in my office and will get rid of them when I have time. We took one of the shelves out and replaced it with a couple racks. None of the same computers are in the racks. Those are different servers they wanted out of other labs.

The big boss does this kind of thing all the time. It is kind of nice because there is no veto or comity with which to appeal the move. He ones the company and what he says goes. I ended up with a big pile of power cables in the corner. Another box of power cables and using a bunch of power cables. There are an extra two or three hundred power cables lying around the place.

It took all morning. I had other stuff that had to take a back seat. That is normal. These kinds of things happen every so often.

We had to move one set of computers that our support people use. This means kicking fifteen people off and shutting down. This would take days of planning unless you have someone with basically sudo powers over people in the company to tell them to just hurry up and wait until things are back up. Then it takes about an hour.

They did some more work after I shifted to other tasks. I still do not understand what the end game will look like. I'm not sure there is a plan beyond make room in one spot and shuffle stuff everywhere else to take the overflow.

There is nothing wrong with that. It is just a unique feel. I came from a huge company that required stuff like environmental impact studies and personnel interviews for moving labs around. I remember trying to get a parking lot repaired took a year for the paperwork. "Where is the rain run off going to go?" "Are there animals living there?" "Will it cause wind or sunlight problems?" Whatever. A frigging year.

What happened today only killed about three to four hours and six or seven people for at least part of it. Honestly, it reminds me of the military. The big boss was a marine.