Two road trips in one day

[nosrednayduj]

Today, my work said we could all come in and get our stuff which has been sequestered for three months, and also we could borrow equipment from our desks. I borrowed my chair, my docking station, and my monitor (although I recently purchased a new monitor, so I'm not sure if I'm going to use the one I borrowed.) I also brought home all my personal stuff, because who knows what's going to happen, and if I have completely cleaned out my desk, then if they want to reorganize the office space, they can just do it. If they lay me off, or if I quit, you would think that would also make it easier, but presumably I would have to return the borrowed equipment in that case, so I'd have to go there anyway. Hopefully neither of these things will happen; I'm unlikely to quit, because getting another job would be quite the pain, in addition to the fact that I really hate working full time. I've been working nearly fulltime -- 6-7 hours a day, and that's really all I ever had in me. Maybe normal humans also are like that, and it would be considered full time anyway. I really don't know.

Anyway, it required a trip up to Waltham, 45 minutes each way, and I got to listen to the radio. I kind of miss listening to the radio while commuting; I never really wanted to do it for as many hours as I always did each week, but once a week is good. Once a month is too little.

On the way home, I stopped at a friend's house, and sold her a Black Lives Matter sign (prearranged). We still have four left, and I think we're going to just keep them, although it's probably better to get them out there, than to keep one for theft remediation.

While I was away, we had a lightning strike near home, and it fried two things: the Comcast modem, and our home server. So for a couple of hours we camped on the neighbors xfinity, and then Comcast got us a new modem. Meanwhile, Ken was researching the options for replacing the server. We had hoped we would be able to just plug in the disk and reboot, but the guy at microcenter said that would not work. So now our hope is to get linux on it, and get it to read the other disk. This is not trivial, because windows machines really don't want you to run anything besides windows… Anyway, I had another nice drive up to Cambridge, listening to the radio. There was some concern about getting there before they closed, but I had 15 minutes, and was not the last customer checking out.

Comments

[cjsmith]

How does it feel to get all your stuff out of there? (When I did it a while back it felt like closure, but then I knew my company was moving office space anyway.)

[nosrednayduj]

It feels kind of weird. I've been working for the same company for 12 years. We've had three different office spaces in my tenure, and we've remodeled the one we're in twice, so I've had 5 desks, and this one for less than a year. So in a sense it feels like "just another move", only I took my box home rather than leaving it on the stack for the movers. But it also feels like an exit. I really don't know how long it'll be before I "go back to work".

I'm kind of excited to have enough equipment to make two workstations, one downstairs with the chaos, and one upstairs away from the chaos. Sometimes I like chaos and other times I need to run away.

[cjsmith]

Oo, two workstations does sound nifty and flexible.

Yeah, my prognosticator is all broken right now. Any change feels like indefinite limbo.