Manufacturing a disaster

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I'm out of the office today. I'm out because I'm feeling sick, mind you -- I genuinely feel like utter trash. So while this means I was able to avoid today's scheduled "Super Service" brainwashing it's not as if I'm out frolicking in the meadow with birds and deer in Disney style.

Not that this has stopped work from relentlessly bombing me. Why should I want something as trivial as sleep in my quest to feel like a functional human again? My desk phone has been ringing nearly non-stop and when it isn't ringing my cell phone has been ringing in its place. In those blissful times when both desk and cellular are silent, the Treo is chiming away with its cheerful "bing-bong!" sound to indicate a new e-mail has been delivered. I know I'm one of only two network engineers this company has but come on, this is retarded. Reading the e-mails gives one the sense that the company is collapsing as I write this. It's not true, obviously, but it does leave me with the impression that I should never take another vacation or sick day again. Of course, I haven't taken any real vacation in the last two years (working at con and the two out of state trips I took last June/July for deaths in the family does not count) so why should I start now?

In other news, people in my neighborhood are strange. I put out some computer equipment, recyclables and miscellaneous junk last night for today's collection. As far as I was concerned it was all trash that was just taking up space in my home. Some ingredients in the pile were:

• a 21" Sun monitor (that Sun had OEM'd from Sony back in the day),
• two broken or otherwise useless laser printers (I consider any printer useless in today's day and age if it doesn't have, at minimum, a USB 2.0 connector on its chassis),
• a Sun SPARCStation 4,
• plastic shelving,
• and a filthy and generally ruined cooler.

Because of raccoons and other random wildlife that tear apart garbage bags I didn't take the actual trash out until this morning. When I reached the end of my driveway I found that sometime overnight both of the printers had been swiped from the top of the pile, although some of the plastic casing from the broken one (which became a lot more broken when I dropped it on my sidewalk last night) was still on the curb. The SPARCStation had likewise been taken. Somebody had opened the cooler and the 21" monitor had been tipped over onto its screen... so somebody could cut off and take the video cable. The video cable ends in a 13W3 connector. Why... did somebody cut off the video cable? What's the point?

Some people just love random, technical-looking trash I guess. At least Doctor Steel loves me.

Rescue me