Still head-down and plodding…
At work I’m still cleaning out the office / store room where I stashed all of the crap our spinoff abandoned in place when the plandemic hit. It’s been six years now and they’re never coming back to the office – we’ve actually rented the space they had on the first floor to someone else and some of their employees now live in places like Spain…
The spinoff did a lot of work on mobile devices – the industrial stuff like Trimble and Juniper and Motorola – and accordingly have about a thousand various “Windows Mobile 6” platform devices in boxes from the heady days of 2007-2011… And all of them still have batteries in them, in various states of ‘spicy pillow’.
The up-side is 90% of the industrial stuff has removable batteries, so I just have to take apart each one and separate the explodie bit from the rest of the machine.
Easy.
Though the look on the counter-guy’s face at Batteries Plus when I dropped off a 20 pound banker’s box full of swollen, sketchy Lithium Ion batteries was priceless…
The down-side is the software of said spinoff is installed on about 75% of the machines and this might have client data in it. On top of this the CEO of said spinoff liked to play with everything, so one of more of every model has his personal info / dropbox installed on it with no password and auto-login to dropbox… And he’s not the kind of person to have complex or unique passwords…
So I have to figure out which charger in the mountain of chargers goes to which device, power on every-single-device, check it, and wipe it – and this is taking a lot of time.
Then my CFO got involved and wants to try and sell a bunch of these antiques, so now I’m also separating wheat from chaff based on arbitrary eBay listings and have boxes of fifteen year old WinMo6 handhelds waiting for him to do something with them.
Long story short; what should have been a few days shoveling out an office so it can be rented has turned into a month-long (so far) ordeal – for reasons…
The saga of the server room AC (a Liebert Challenger 3000) seems to have finally come to a conclusion and the HVAC vendor has finally figured it out… It’s been running non-stop now for a bit over a week, and it’s currently 74 in the server room and 2 degrees outside – well below the 32 is would fail at previously… So I finally get to not go into the office every weekend to adjust portable AC units to keep the place running.
My roommate still hasn’t landed a job – it’s been seven months now. The psychiatrist office that is interested in him has been leading him on for six of those seven months.
There isn’t much I can do to help other than keep footing the bills… Having him here all day, every day, has increased the utilities by about a third because the heat/AC is now on all day, the kitchen gets used a lot more, and his computers/TV run all day.
And my CFO has been covering his half of the rent, which I can only imagine is coming to an end soon as, again, it’s been seven months… When that happens I’m not sure what it means for me as I can’t afford the rent here – and everything else – myself.
The problem is Denver is now L.A. prices as far as rent is concerned, and a studio apartment is around $2000 a month – or about double what I pay now. So even me – 40 years experience high-power IT professional with over 20 years at the company – can’t really afford to live here.
So – I’m not really sure what’s next.
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