Work has been crazy for the last few weeks; every day the CFO has 4-6 new side-quests for me to accomplish on top of the tasks I actually get paid to do.
Some of it is goofy things like creating the design for a vinyl wall mural-thing for the Biometrics department, or creating a 4K image to run on an LG art-panel that he wants to use to replace the building directory in the lobby… Apparently creating the plastic nameplates for the old-school 90’s light-box directory is a lost art and it runs about $200 to get a new one made – so he’s decided to replace it with an LCD monitor. And as I was seen using Photoshop two decades ago, making the graphic is my problem…
Then there’s the building maintenance stuff; dealing with the old HVAC company, finding a new HVAC company to replace them, getting the north RTU fixed (it turned out to be a blown VFD versus the blown motor, compressor, controls, and VFD that the previous company claimed was the issue). And there was the startup process for the buildings boiler that necessitated some plumbing repairs before I could get it back online.
Then (oh yes, there’s more) the CFO decided to rent the offices our biometrics team were using and I had one whole week to get them moved (six offices of full of crap shuffled from one end of the building to another), everything re-wired, the old spaces removed from the network and the alarm system disabled… Got all of my tasks done yesterday, the offices will get the paint done today, and the new tenant will be moving in tomorrow.
Oh, and he’s renting a space on the second floor to an acquaintance, and said acquaintance gets free Internet, so I have to fish wire from the second floor electrical room to the far end of the building, and then build a separate network segment to make it happen… At least this is tangential to what I actually get paid to do around here.
Then there’s all of the daily random crap – like yesterdays random tasking to create some way of ensuring every person we drag in for a data collect is only sampled one time…
See – we do biometric data collects for testing, and that involves somewhere between 100 and 500 people traipsing into the office, doing some 5-10 minute test procedure, and getting a $50 grocery gift card for their effort.
Unfortunately, these days a $50 grocery gift card is enough to get people trying to exploit the system, so we get people coming back in repeatedly under new names to try and score more gift cards…
Initially they wanted me to code some software to do this, but I think I have a COTS solution by way of using a laptop, a web cam, and the face matching functionality of DigiKam… It works, but it didn’t require me to spend a hundred hours of my already limited time to write something custom – so they won’t like it.
Then there’s the NAS sitting on my desk utilizing the slowest method possible to do a secure erase because someone in Biometrics with absolutely no clue wrote it into a procedure… And because it’s in the procedure I have to do it…
So – instead of pulling the 4 drives out of the NAS, slapping them into my external SATA enclosure, and DoD wiping each drive in parallel across four 6g/s channels in about four hours – I have to use Windows SDelete…
SDelete only wipes free space and it only understands mapped drives in Windows… So I first had to get Windows to delete 4TB of data in about 12 million files – which took a day – then I have to do a three-pass DoD wipe over a network connection to the slow-ass NAS… It’s been two days now and it’s 35% done.
Yes, what would normally take four hours is going to occupy space on my workbench for over a week because someone who really shouldn’t be making technical decisions made a technical decision…
Anyway, this is why I’ve been grumpy for the last month.
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