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[Ziiro]

I wish wearing a medical mask was more socially acceptable in the west. It just makes goddamn sense.

[Classic]

Just as a sign of, "YO! I BE SICK AS HELL"? At the very least?

[Thad]

I wish wearing a medical mask was more socially acceptable in the west. It just makes goddamn sense.

Well, it depends on what you're trying to protect yourself against.

I've hit a point where I wear a dust mask when I open up old computers.  It's fucking irritating, but the last time I got a faceful of dust I was sick for weeks, and that's much more irritating.

[Ziiro]

Outside health care facilities, simple, inexpensive masks of similar appearance are commonly worn in heavily populated centres in East Asia to help prevent spreading the common cold. In Japan, it is common to wear a face mask while sick to avoid infecting others in public settings.[1] Surgical masks were widely used in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Toronto, Canada during outbreaks of the SARS virus, during the 2007 avian bird flu pandemic in Japan, and more recently in the United States and Mexico City during the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, also known as the swine flu. It is also worn by people in dusty environments such as sanitation workers.

Either in the case of "I'm sick" or "Everyone around me is sick." when walking around public/work/etc.

[Thad]

Yeah, and they did fuck-all against SARS, is my point.  Not sure about bird/swine flu, but the latter at least turned out to be a pretty overblown panic.

[Thad]

Fair enough.  Per WebMD, at least in the case of SARS masks were much more useful if sick people wore them than if healthy people did.  Jon Cohen at Slate suggests that Swine Flu was much the same.

So yeah, I guess if you're sick and ABSOLUTELY CANNOT JUST STAY THE FUCK HOME, then by all means you should wear one.  But wearing one isn't going to do much to PREVENT you from getting sick.

[Thad]

Well, the good news is, the Win7 rollout is about to begin in earnest.  This is good news because companies do not generally stop in the middle of replacing every single computer in their business.  This is the closest thing a temp can have to job security.

Also good news: the revised estimates are saying this will take until November, which is three months beyond my original contract.

The bad news: That estimate relies on me getting 38 computers out the door every week.

I have enough ports for that, but not enough desk space for all the laptops, and not enough KVM switches for all the desktops.  I have asked for more of these things and hopefully they will be forthcoming.

Even so, while I could feasibly get 20 or so computers done a day if everything ran smoothly, well, it doesn't.  Sometimes policy doesn't get applied properly and computers go into hibernation overnight, interrupting encryption and meaning I have to wait for it all through the next day.  (Or, worse, some of the desktops get stuck and won't boot if that happens and have to be started over.)

And even if that part goes smoothly, SCCM is spotty as hell at actually installing packages.  Sometimes things will go smoothly for a whole week with no problems, and then one day it'll be a mess of machines without their packages installed and we'll have to do them manually.  We've yet to find any pattern to this.

And of course THOSE problems assume I'll have stock to work with in the first damn place.  We're waiting on shipments of new equipment, and for now we've got a good, sizable stack of used equipment.  But as time goes on we're going to have to rely on users returning their old computers so I can reimage and redeploy them -- and let me tell you something about relying on users to put things in boxes, tape them up, stick labels on them, and take them to the mailroom: you can't.

So the good news: the guys I work with have pretty much flat-out said that 38 a week is an impossible goal (at least until we finish our arrangement to have a third party do the imaging and encryption for us so all we've got to do is the package installation and profile migration), and that I should just do my best and we can revise our estimates as we go.

But of course the BAD news is that falling behind schedule will mean more pressure, and yes falling behind schedule is pretty much inevitable.

Ah well.  So it goes; back to it.

[Rico]

I just sold $60 of zombie books to a very good-looking 20-something who just got done doing modelling for DC for Wonder Girl.

[Beat Bandit]

...and your penis is currently inside her?

[Mongrel]

That's a different thread, BB.

[Rico]

Yes; oh, for the ability to post that in Good Tiiiiiimes.

[Mongrel]

There's a guy at my work who's been there same time as me - a little over a year, which makes us still kind of new, but we're well-established regulars now.

Anyway, he's good at the job and has no trouble, but he actually used to work for the police as a civilian researcher for a unit that worked Credit Card fraud, so this is kind of easy shit for him. He was working hard behind the scenes to get another cop-helper job and he did alright on that front, because after umpty-ump background checks, he landed another one.

Now, his new job will start in June or maybe July, so he's still with us for now, but in the meantime he's basically been trolling management out of sheer boredom. He'll go out and FIND fraud - double the expected monthly totals, as a matter of fact - and cancel the accounts, but that's it. He's come in hours and hours late to see if anyone would notice, he spent a month and a half not putting any of his "kills" in the database (so it looked like he was actually doing no work at all), ignored his phone blocks, whatever. Each time he was caught, he'd play dumb, fix up his "mistake" and find something new to break and they'd add a new item to this list of stuff they were scrutinizing about him. It was pretty funny.

I had to laugh though. Management found the best revenge. Not realizing he's already got a line out, they assumed he's some ADD-riddled wall-bouncer (As bored as he is, I don't think he has ADD, he's very laid back and focused) who needs to be given more complex tasks to "stimulate him", so now they're giving him these huge, complicated, time-sinking jobs to do as if he was a human Jack Russel Terrier. Of course now he has all this awful drudge work to do which will take hours and hours and hours, so the joke's back on him.

I can't say he's being a complete sport about it (he mostly is), but he sees the humour in it at least.

[Thad]

That's what you get for rocking the boat.

I've got my busy days and my slow days (and if you graphed my posts per day, you'd probably be able to tell which is which -- hey, do we still have a stats page?).  Today was...well, kinda both.  I didn't have a lot on my plate so I took the time to organize my office.  I moved the shit that was in boxes under a table to drawers in the cube that we just unburied; I moved the WinXP-imaged desktops from on top of that table to underneath, and put my stacks of Win7-imaged laptops on the table where they'd been, organized by model so that I won't have to dig through piles to figure out what the hell my stock is anymore.  And we've got old shit that needs to be decommissioned taking up a lot of shelf space, and used-but-reusable shit that needs to be reimaged taking up a lot of floor space, so I went to work on getting old laptops off shelves, popping their hard drives, taking them out of inventory, and stacking them by the door so we can haul them out for donation.

Let me tell you something about the Thinkpad T60.

Its hard drive is held in by a cover.  The cover is attached by a single screw.

And about one time in four, that fucking screw will not come out.  It just spins in place.  Even if you turn the thing upside down and give it a good whack, the screw doesn't go anywhere.

Anyone who's ever worked on the innards of a computer for more than five minutes can probably see where this is going.

I DID manage to get through almost the entire day without stabbing myself with a screwdriver, deciding that I was done now, and spending the rest of the day reading The Fuller Memorandum.

[Thad]

If I got to set IT policy, here are a couple of rules I'd pitch:

• If you return a computer without first removing all stickers and at the very least wiping it down with a damp paper towel, your department will be charged a cleaning fee.
• If your password has been reset so that someone can build you a new computer, and you change your password while he's still WORKING on that new computer, he will stop.  No notification to you, no phone call to remind you you weren't supposed to change your password -- you just don't get your computer now.  When you finally call to ask what the holdup is, your password will be reset again, you will be reminded you are not supposed to change it, and your computer will be put back into the work queue.  At the bottom.  What's that?  It's a high-priority ticket and you need it tomorrow?  Well then maybe you shouldn't be actively preventing me from working on it, you idiot.

[Büge]

You should work your way up into a position where you can enact those regulations, just out of spite.

[Doom]

Thad's Tech Shack

"The Best Service and Fuck You."

[Thad]

Hey, these laptops piled up on my floor sure do look a lot like the ones I had sorted and neatly stacked on shelves until you grabbed them last week and said you'd give them to somebody else to work on.

Except now they're no longer sorted, and sitting in piles on the floor.

[Ted Belmont]

Technically, that is still sorting. Of a kind.

[Beat Bandit]

So I came in this morning to a thin project ouline and brand new copy of Microsoft Project on my desk with a note to "get this done".

Two hours later and I'm still not sure what Project does.

[Mongrel]

Clearly it projects things

Like your boss' secret longings >__>