Pajamas, no bra - I hope I get to work from home forever! But I want to go out sometime, too. Just not to the office.
Yeah, going back into the office for three days was enough to remind me of why I prefer working from home (among other things, a grown woman repeatedly barking to demonstrate to everyone how her dog was barking when she left for work). Also, the roof there has several new leaks, making me wonder why management has been so eagerly throwing money at upgrading certain areas of the office while seemingly ignoring the condition of the roof.
Also, when I’m at home I can keep an eye on the kitten rescue live cam.
As far as venturing out more, it’s starting to sound like I get to make a grocery store run on Saturday, along with a trip back to the shop for an air filter for one of my Jeeps (went in for an oil change last weekend; they don’t stock many parts for a nearly 23-year-old vehicle).
Warning jargon filled gripe.
I understand why we’re switching to pseudo-wires. It save a lot of cash over the traditional TDM set up. I mean, if we can knock an AT&T loop out of the equation and save over $7000 MRC, we’d be foolish not to use this.
But I have to ask: What is the fucking point, if I can’t get anything to work? It’s a simple T1 - the second most basic circuit you could build in telecom. It’s only going thirty miles. There are six more just like it that seem to be working fine. Why can’t I get this one to work? We’ve tried different paths through the MPLS network. We’ve come off three different ports in the routers. I’ve even had the field techs get behind the panels and rewire the damned things (they loved me for that one). Every fifty minutes, like clockwork, we get stuttering AIS and LOS alarms for twenty-three seconds.
Don’t then
I wore sweatpants to work pretty much every day for three years prior to retirement.
Mostly because I had to drag around so much equipment - in a backpack,taking mass transit - from site to site that I wasn’t about to add a change of clothes into the mix. And I also wasn’t going to go all the home and change then come back into the city for yoga class.
If there was something I need to dress up for, I had a couple of pairs of stretch pants styled as dress pants. But most days I wore sweats or yoga pants. Everyone got used to it.
Oh man, I had a coworker in an adjacent cube a few years ago who brought his lunch to work every day, and insisted on eating at his desk instead of in the lunch room. Every day around 3pm he’d start eating and all I could hear was the constant scrape scrape scrape of spoon on dish for about half an hour. It was like nails on a chalkboard for me. Sometimes I’d have to get up and go for a walk just to get away from it. He eventually got moved to another cube far enough away that I didn’t have to hear it.
Squirrels
Lonnnng before retirement, I decided that I was hired for my skills, not my outfits. So I started wearing jeans and a shirt (decent, but no tie) every day. Handy hint: I eased into it by wearing new black jeans; you had to get close before you noticed, but they were just as comfy.
My wife was sure I’d get fired or reprimanded but I told her she knew I was a hippie wannabe when she married me… and guess what, I got promoted to department supervisor over ass-kissing suit-‘n’-tie Mad Men (it was an ad agency).
I did chortle when the Big Boss bellowed “American Fambly (name changed for anonymity) will be here in twenty minutes! Bring everything we’ve done for any financial client to the conference room!”
I volunteered to shave and find a tie, but he yelled “Are you crazy? Thank god you’re at max scruffiness, we need to look creative! Do you have a clip-on ponytail?”
While I can give you no answers, as someone who remembers when cell towers with equipment that had no idea what “IP packets” are were all converted from T1s to pseudowire over metro ethernet, I sympathize.
We are now looking at just changing the acceptable reliability standards. I’d be okay with some errors on T-1s carrying (non 911) trunks, but I’m trying to regroom SS7s.
One place I worked at was two states away from the main corporate-types and had a rather relaxed dress code. Every few months though, the local manager would send out an email, “Big-people clothes tomorrow, please. Corporate is visiting.” Nobody let him down.
I wish our office could be that reasonable. I work in southern California for a large engineering firm who’s corporate office is in the mid west. All of our competitors have long since switched to business casual but we get yelled at if we dare to wear jeans on any day other than Friday.
It’s that time of year again. Annual performance reviews. Complete with self assessment.
I didn’t catch the server room on fire. That counts for something, right?
That reminds me of the day someone called my dad from his work to let him know the server room was on fire. I don’t think it was a big fire, though.
There’s a story I was told a couple decades back by some people who worked in NOCs (network operations center). It was of the variety of “too good to be true, but it really ought to be.”
It seems this particular university had a NOC that was fairly advanced, in that it had some sensors installed to monitor things like temperature and humidity and it could call someone for help if the measurements got out of range or if a server went down or the T1 lost its connection and so on and so forth, all so that someone didn’t have to be there nights and weekends.
They’d recorded a whole bunch of individual words that could be used to describe different problems so that the admin on-call would have some idea of what was needed, and the call was made by the computer over a POTS (plain old telephone service) line by stringing together a bunch of those pre-recorded words (think AT&T time and temperature—is that even a thing anymore?).
One very hot, humid night, the A/C cooling the server room lost power. The temperature level in the server room started to climb, and for some reason there was also a fire sprinkler that went off (don’t ask, I didn’t so I don’t know why there’d be one in the room; maybe it was outside the room and the water came in under the door and anyway I think this was before non-water fire suppression systems), and eventually the combination of heat and moisture reached a level that made the automated system phone the on-call admin.
It is important to know, here, that the recorded voice happened to be female and she apparently had a breathy, Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to JFK kind of voice.
So at 3 or so in the morning, the phone rings at the on-call admin’s house. Phone happens to be on the wife’s side of the bed. She answers the phone and hears a woman’s voice saying, “I’m. hot. I’m. wet.”
The admin did get the issue fixed at the NOC. And, eventually, the issue fixed with his wife.
How bad is it to read that and wonder whether the cables will be bound with tiny cummerbunds instead of those plastic ties?
At this rate, I’d be happy if the cables were bound at all.
“It’s Jake, from Allstate”. Heh. Great story. Having to explain that it was the server calling, and dashing out of the house must have been a bit difficult.
Nitpick: It’s Jake, from State Farm.
Sure, it is.
For several months after my dad left a management position at one company for a better position at another, he would still get alerts by phone from the security firm that monitored the smoke detectors and fire alarms at his old workplace. These calls (which weren’t automated – he spoke to actual people) inevitably happened in the middle of the night. The first few times, he made an effort to contact someone who he thought might be in charge of such things; once he realized that no one cared that he was still the primary contact with the security firm, he would answer the calls, thank the security people for calling, and go back to sleep.
(It’s worth noting that a good chunk of the factory was extremely old, with questionable wiring, and was known for having false alarms.)