Work owned me again, but tonight I celebrate victory.

[feren]

Last night I was at the office until about 2200 hours, evicting linnaeus and the others on his team from the floor at 2000 so I could start ripping equipment out. If markvd hadn't stayed late to help me my efforts would have been a dismal failure; my RSI-crippled wrists were in no shape to apply the level of torque and pressure necessary to break a number of the screws lose from where they'd been driven in with a drill some 7 years previous.

Today I was at the office by 0630 this morning and I left at 2057. Big thanks are owed to markvd, TK and GK (neither of whom have a LiveJournal... yet...) for their part in helping make my escape at that early hour possible. Yes, an escape at 9PM is early. The actual work was done at 1745, the remaining three hours were just basic cleanup and housekeeping tasks that ranged from throwing out boxes and the old (now scrap) equipment cabinets to tweaking the switch configuration to get printers on the proper VLAN. To put all this in perspective, the outage window for my work was scheduled to run until 11PM, with cleanup getting that meant getting out of the office sometime around 3AM. So to me this was very early.

Today's effort represents the conclusion of a project that I've been working on since May of 2006. Now that I'm home and the final tasks have been closed out of our change management system I am celebrating with the traditional gin & tonic before I throw myself into a shower to de-stink. This shower is imperative because it was 87 degrees Farenheit at my desk, and considerably higher than that in the switch closet that we spent the day working in. It's so nice of our management to never foot the bill to have the office building run the HVAC system over the weekend or past 6pm, despite the near-constant presence of employees during those "off-peak" hours.

Pictures shall soon follow of (in no particular order): the mayhem of decorating a coworker's cube, funny words on booze bottles, destruction of a switch closet, me giving birth to a rat's nest of patch cables, the beauty that is a fully rebuilt switch closet and an almost perfectly-loomed set of racks supporting some 400+ ports for one floor of users. May I never have to do this again.

Doctor Steel loves me

Comments

[markvd.livejournal.com]

$employer needs to buy me a new set of knees. ouch.

[roho.livejournal.com]

I know $Employer doesn't believe in such, but goddamn they owe you some flex time for the recent BS. Even some work-from-home days would be a start. But that's probably 'stealing from the company', since you wouldn't be converting the necessary O2 to CO2 in the building itself. Stealing from the employee is, of course, encouraged! I've said it before, they wouldn't be called human resources if they weren't meant to be strip mined.

Anyways, congrats on getting it done and gone! Gin ahoy!

[linnaeus.livejournal.com]

Back during the ISIS implementation we were able to get them to cough up for AC for a few weekends, but it involved getting approvals akin to those required to launch a missile. Nice job on TM's cube, by the way. I think the one in his mailbox is what tips it in. :)

your job...

[hayseed.livejournal.com]

...sounds a lot like my other half's. Outtages are meant to go from 9pm-12am and he doesn't get home till 2am-3am generally. This is on Friday nights too - cause everyone is always available to work on a Friday night! :P

[riecka.livejournal.com]

sigh.. when will you and Otter learn that Doctor Steele causes pain and suffering ? =P *runs* lol

[feren.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly certain that having Doctor Steel blasting at high volume in my iPod's earphones was the only thing that kept me motivated through the last half of that wretched day. "Drop Da' Bomb" could be an anthem for employees the world over.