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Category Archives: storytime

In which I raise my voice

Today’s story is one of shock and outrage.  It is a true story.  It is a story of something that occurred at work.  Let’s begin.

I have been working some very long hours at work trying to meet a ridiculous deadline.  I spend these long hours mostly out on our assembly floor next to the machine I am trying to start up.  The assembly floor is not a terribly clean place.  The guys make some effort cleaning their work areas, but it’s a warehouse-like space so it’s never as neat and clean as the office portion of our building.

Anyway, as I was doing stuff next to the machine, I decided that I needed to reference the electrical diagram.  I took the drawings out their pocket on the machine and as I was perusing the drawing, I suddenly found a large black and red spider walking across the top page. There is a picture a spider after the cut.

Voiding Warranties

Why yes, I do have this shirt.

Monday morning was an interesting morning.  It was a voiding warranties kind of morning.  You see, I had broken a hinge on my work laptop, maer tupointo, over the weekend when I was working.  It happened right as I was about to leave, so I decided to just leave it until I got in today.  But…I had forgotten by Monday.  So when I got in that morning, maer was sitting there all forlorn with a broken right hip.

This wouldn’t really be a big deal if maer just sat on my desk all day.  LeeEv, my main machine at home, has had a broken left hip for years now.  Since he mostly sits at home, especially after Codename Roodee became my runner machine, his broken hip hasn’t really been much of a hindrance to doing stuff.  But, maer doesn’t just sit on my desk.  Maer goes everywhere with me.  Maer needs to put up with a lot of abuse.  I cannot work if maer has a broken right hip.  Now what?

Lucky for me, level boss (who may now also be my stage boss) realized that it would be a big deal if maer blew up or something.  So he cloned maer onto my old laptop, Roanmaer.

An aside about Roanmaer: Roanmaer, after leaving my service because of a faulty serial port, was relegated to the final boss to use when he was traveling.  That’s right.  The final boss got a hand-me-down from ME, a lowly engineer.  But anyway, he then decided that it was too difficult for him to work with Roanmaer because of the small screen.  I have the smallest laptop of all the guys here…probably because I’m the youngest engineer and I enjoy the good eyesight of youth.  So anyway, stage boss decided to clone maer onto Roanmaer and give Roanmaer back to me for safe keeping and for use as a backup.  End aside.

Since Roanmaer is my backup, I could have tried just using Roanmaer for most of maer’s current duties.  But the problem is, I had all my code stored on maer’s hard drive and not on the network where I could easily access it with Roanmaer.  Also, because Roanmaer is a clone of maer, there’s all kind of licensing issues with the all the different proprietary programming software I have to use.  I can work around stuff like that temporarily, but it’s a big pain and we’re under huge time constraints.  And…maer has a nicer screen resolution than Roanmaer.  So…I ended up stealing a hinge from Roanmaer to put into maer.  It took about an hour because I couldn’t really decide if I wanted to do the transplant.  But I did it and I also accidentally snapped a peg off of Roanmaer that keeps the hinge in place.  And now Roanmaer is bundled and wrapped and sitting securely by herself awaiting a new hip.  Maer is back up and running and putting up with abuse with the transplanted hip.

Incidentally, maer’s hinges were never really up to par with Roanmaer’s hinges.  Roanmaer’s hinges always operated smoothly without all the crackling and creaking maer’s hinges would emit.  Roanmaer is probably two years older than maer too.  They do not make laptops like they used to.

Also, having replaced one of the hinges on maer (and a new set is being ordered for me so both Roanmaer and maer will have working hinges), I’ve finally ordered parts for LeeEv.  UPS tells me that they’ll be here Monday.  LeeEv will finally get to undergo a hip transplant.  And…also the front bezel and back cover.  LeeEv’s hip didn’t just break, it shattered.  Poor LeeEv.