revjim.net :: work

work

August 4th, 2003

After two days of "strike duty", mostly, I'm just tired. And the tiredness has very little to do with working and a lot more to do with trying to strech myself to thin on the few hours I have left in each day. Last night, I got home around 7pm. Jess and I made dinner, and then laid down on the couch to watch TV. I passed out. Cold. Before 9pm. Ugh.

There hasn't been a lot of work to be done. There's enough, but it certainly isn't a lot. I can't believe that they originally felt they needed three people to handle this job. And I've been doing more work than will need to be done after a week or so, because there are still little glitches and installs that need to take place.

For the past two days, they've brought in another guy to help out. More than anything, he was a burden. His badge doesn't work in the building, and noone will be around until today to fix it for him, which means he has to follow me around like a puppy dog. But even if that wasn't the case, he slows me down.

For example, at one point we went into a room to install a printer and Office2k and 7 computers. He sat down at one and started going, while I fixed a mouse or something on another. Then I started on one of the other machines. After a little while, I had finished 6 of them, and he was still sitting in front of the first one. "Oh, well. No big deal. At least that's one left that I have to do," I thought to myself. He clicked "Finish" and I said, "Ready?". To which he replied that he just finished the printer and still had to install Office2k. As I waited for him to finish up, I could have done 2 or 3 more machines.

On another ocassion, I had some LAN issues to fix. So I gave him my badge and told him to go put ONE computer in ONE cube on another floor and then meet me back where I was. I did all of the LAN work. I fixed some phones. I installed some custom software for a few people. I fixed some ACD issues. I installed a printer. I checked my voicemail and my work email. I read the latest news. He still wasn't back. One computer! Literally. Just put it on the desk, plug it in, turn it on and walk away.

He takes at least 10 bathroom breaks a day. He starts whining about how hungry he is after 2 hours of work. He constantly says things like, "Man… I'm going to sleep good tonight" even though, the work we're doing is hardly difficult and rarely physically taxing.

We have a room full of 12 computers that need to be provisioned. A task that would take any of the other people that have worked on this project about 1.5 hours (TOPS!!) to do. If he is here today, I'm going to sit him in that room and have him do them all. That ought to keep him out of my hair for a while.

All that aside, I'm pretty bored. After everything is fixed, there isn't much left to do but sit around and wait for something else to break or for someone to discover something that we missed. Hopefully, by Wednesday or Thursday I'll have my office setup, with a computer of my own, and I can just work on whatever I need to work on while I wait for something else to do.

Additionally, after I realized that only 1 person (if that) would be needed at any given time to do what we're doing, I rewrote the schedule so that I will report to my regular job for all but 4 hours a day (except on Monday's — where I don't do my regular job at all — and on Sunday's — where I ONLY do my regular job — and Saturday's which are my days off).

For those of you that are wondering, here is my schedule for the time being: