Tag Archives: Thoughts

Wilmington Trip

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Sandie and I took a long weekend and drove up/over to Wilmington, NC, last Friday. She lived there for about 14 years and wanted to show me around a bit and reconnect with some old friends.

We tried to go to a seafood place at Wrightsville Beach for dinner Friday, but the line to get is was so long that we bailed on the idea and got Mexican food instead.

Saturday, we went to the historic district, took a walking tour, and got some seafood at a bar and grill (which was actually really good). Saturday night, we drove past Sandie’s old house and she spotted a neighbor “kid” (now with two kids of his own) that she recognized from her time there, so we wound up spending an hour at their house. Not overly thrilling for ME (shoot, I didn’t know anybody), but she had a good time.

Sandie and one of her old buddies pose in front of a giant basket of French fries

That evening, we went to one of her old hangs – a pool/dart bar – and hung out with some of her old friends while being filled with bourbon by one of her old bartenders.

Fortunately, we got an Uber driver for that last, because the bourbon was pretty freaking good.

Wilmington has an extraordinary history as one of the earliest, largest, and most influential towns in North Carolina – Cornelius Harnett, for example, was a signer of the Articles of Confederation and a native Wilmingtonian – but it also has a pretty dark period which was nearly forgotten until just the last 10 years or so. I’m speaking, of course, about the Wilmington Massacre of 1989. During a few days in November of that year, a group of White Supremacist Democrats not only completed the only successful coup d’etat in American history, but also exiled the majority of the city’s prominent blacks (and a good number of sympathetic whites), and murdered between 10 and 200 other blacks (nobody seems to have a good grasp on the actual number). As a result, huge numbers of blacks fled the city, flipping it from majority black to majority white literally overnight, draining it of skilled and unskilled labor, and pretty much handcuffing it economically.

The massacre can in some ways be considered to be the spark that spread Jim Crow throughout the south, as it became a blueprint for Southern Democrats on how to disenfranchise blacks without also losing the poor/illiterate whites. One enduring legacy – in 1898, blacks made up 56% of the population in Wilmington. Today, that number is 16%. This is not a spurious relationship – Wilmington today is still seen by many blacks as somewhat of a sundown town.

If you’d like to learn more about this, check out Wilmington’s Lie – a well-told and well-researched tome covering the event itself, the political causes of it, and the political fallout from it. I found it to be eye-opening, depressing, and fascinating – and quite relevant to today’s political and racial climate.

Grave of Cornelius Harnett

Week of 10/22/18

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Monday: Thought that I’d try something different this week and put down some notes from each day into a post that will be published at the end of the week.

I played a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t the best thing that I’ve ever been involved with, but it probably wasn’t the worst, either. We had a decent crowd at Gwinnett Infinity Theater, and – in spite of a few close calls – the band didn’t fall apart.

After the concert, I stopped at MicroCenter and picked up a mini Bluetooth keyboard, which I’ve paired to my phone (and am currently using to type this). Together with the WordPress app that I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, my phone is actually becoming something that I can legitimately use for writing. Yes, the KB is pretty cramped, and the shift keys aren’t exactly where I expect for them to be, but with practice, I can probably get up to 60-70 words per minute, which is amazing.

After the stop at MicroCenter, I went over to visit Herb in his new assisted living place. It’s a pretty good setup for him, and is close to Jenny and me. He’s got a small bedroom/office in one room, and kitchen/living room in another, and a good-sized bathroom. Pretty homey, all things considered, and he’s got caregivers around the clock, which is excellent. I helped him get his wireless printer set up and gave him a ream of paper (I’ve got more than I’ll ever use). Jenny was also there, so we visited for a bit before I came home, watched some television, did some laundry, and hit the sack.

Printers were the bane of my existence at work today. About a week ago, one of my firms decided to swap two printers. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, and I would just have to change their names in the group policy that pushes them out to workstations. Something went wrong with the policy, however, and I spend much of last week trying to get things working. Not only did the two printers not swap like they were supposed to, but people started losing OTHER printers. I got a frantic call from the client admin this morning saying that nobody on the second floor of the building had any printers.

So I spent all day trying various things to figure out what the hell was going on. Between 5:30 and 6:00 I think I finally got things working normally. It’s my hunch that the policy was never set up correctly when the firm came on board two months ago. I’m guessing that the on-site people manually installed everybody’s printers and nobody noticed that the policy wasn’t working until something had to change. When I made that change, all of the problems came to light.

It was, to put it mildly, a frustrating day.

I did get a little bit of time during the day to do some more work on a powershell script that I’ve been writing, and that was fun. I’m trying to, basically, rewrite the registry editor so that I can modify specific user hives in remote terminal servers. There are probably a hundred other (better) ways to do what I’m trying to do, but I’ve never used Powershell as much as I should have when I was managing systems, and learning a new language is a nice break during otherwise monotonous days.

Tomorrow will be another stressful day – we’re migrating four firms to Office 365. Two of my guys are in the O365 phone queue for expected heavy traffic, and two others are on a project in Florida, so my team will be severely short-handed.

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Tuesday: The weather took a turn for the cool this morning. I think it was in the low 50s when I got up and hovering around 60 when I left for work. Never got warmer than the low 70s.

Work itself wasn’t too bad. I had to do a few more tweaks for the printers that have taken up much of the last week, but got that out of the way early this morning. The rest of the day was spent closing tickets and helping my team with their own. Also got a little bit of work done on my Powers he’ll script and though of a few things that I can add to it.

Learned from one of my team that our team entry into last week’s Mega Millions drawing actually bore some fruit! We bought 9 tickets as a team on Friday as a part of a team-building exercise (went out to dinner at Dave & Busters), and we won $200. Not a billion bucks, but not bad. Of course, nobody won the whole thing, so tonight’s drawing, as you may know, is the largest jackpot ever at over $1.6 billion. Yes, I do have tickets – bought twenty of the things on my own. If I win, maybe I’ll throw some cash at my team.

I got home fairly late tonight – somewhere between 7 and 7:30 – and didn’t do much at all. Watched some television, washed some dirty dishes, and now I’m in bed. Maybe I’ll be a billionaire when I wake up.

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Wednesday: Not a billionaire. Not even a millionaire. In fact, on the twenty lottery tickets that I had – that’s 106 numbers altogether, I matched exactly…none. Oh well. Back to the grind, I guess.

It was nippy today for a while. Tomorrow is supposed to be nippier, with a high in the 60s. I’m not sure if it got over 70 today, but I was inside for most of the day, so I was comfortable in my Downtown Magnetawan tee and jeans. I had high hopes of closing out a bunch of tickets today, but things kept getting in the way and I honestly don’t know what my final numbers were.

Did an interview from 4 to 5:30. Nice kid, but he won’t be working for us. The three of us who interviewed him were unanimous in our opinions that he has absolutely no computer skills, in spite of his degree in cyber security.

Learned this afternoon that I have to do one-on-one meetings with my team before 11/15 – which in my case means before 11/1. So every day between tomorrow and next Friday will be spent in preparing – gathering metrics, listening to phone calls, reading ticket summaries, etc. Not my idea of a good time. We’ll also be migrating firms to Office 365 every night from tonight until the end of the year, which is going to cause high ticket loads every morning. This is the biggest project the X-Company has ever attempted, and I don’t think it’ll be a lot of fun, but it does need to be done.

I tied the registry portion of my Power Shell project into the lookup portion of it today, and it’s working quite well. This tool may actually wind up being really REALLY useful for my team.

Got home fairly late again tonight – somewhere around 7 – and make a couple of chicken sandwiches to eat while watching “The Newsroom” on Prime Video. That was it. Sitting in bed now and am about to be lying in bed. Just waiting for the kitties to settle in.

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Thursday: It was indeed a little cold today, with highs in the mid-60s and an unrelenting breeze. Normally, I would love that, but I underestimated the prognosticators and wore a tee shirt to work – did not bring a jacket. Of course, it was completely comfortable in the office, but my breaks outside were cold.

Tried to prepare for my 1-on-1 meetings with my directs for about half of the day, worked on tickets for most of the other half, and had my own 1-on-1 with my boss, where I learned that I’m doing pretty good. We talked about my future plans – whether I’d stick with the management path or jump to an upcoming escalations specialist spot. I said that, in my heart of hearts, I’m a techy; but that I’m determined to see if I can get comfortable in an admin role. That being the case, I do not intend to apply for the ES role when it comes up.

Turns out that I’ve got the inside track to a management promotion as we continue to add level 1 employees. My boss doesn’t want to have more than 12 directs. As we add more L1s, we’ll break them up into more teams, each with a team lead (leads currently report to my boss). The plan is to put another level in between the L1 leads and the Service director (my boss), and that’ s where I’d go. The leads would report to me and I’d report to the service director.

As I grow more comfortable in this role, I can see where that position would be more to my liking – dealing with intelligent technical leads without having to also deal with the daily grind of dealing with newbies who may or may not have a future in tech. Certainly something to think about.

We also talked about our respective personalities and how we approach our leadership positions. Turns out that both of us harbor inner thoughts that we’re frauds, which is oddly comforting. So I’ll soldier on and continue to work on my leadership and motivational skills (or lack thereof), and will continue to try to make this a new 2nd-act career.

At the end of the day, my friend Schuyler and I dug into my Power Shell project and tweaked and played until after 6:00. That being the case, I didn’t get home until close to 7:00. Made a shepherds pie for dinner (very good), did some dishes, and watched a hilarious mockumentary about a terrible survivalist. It was called, I think, “Tex Montana Will Survive.”

Got in bed with the intention of watching some college football, but it appears that it is not on a local (non-cable) channel, so I guess I’ll just go to sleep.

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Friday: A cold, drizzly day to end out the work week. At least I was smart enough to wear a rain coat today.

Worked on tickets for most of the day. Had one 1×1 meeting at around 11:30 and got some coding done late in the day, but for the most part, I zoned out to tunes and worked on problems. Had one guy not show up for work – he sent me a picture of the side of his car, said that he was hung up and waiting for AAA. 2 hours later said that AAA had just picked him up (this was a also at around 11:30), but he never came in. Very smart guy. Good guy. And this is his third unexcsused absence in two months and the second this week. We’ll be having a meeting on Monday, which I do not want to have. But… I wanted to manage people, right?

I got home by 6 o’clock or so and it was 60 inside the house. Hated to do it, but I was sort of tired of being right on the verge of cold, so I turned on the heat (set to 68). It’s the first time I’ve had it on since probably March, and the earliest that I can remember turning it on. My Nest thermostat needed something different, though, and I’m interested to learn if it handles heating as well as it handled cooling all summer. The heat has been off for the last hour or so, so I’m not overly concerned yet about my natural gas bill. Plus, we’re supposed to rebound and be back in the 70s by tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I don’t have many big plans for the weekend. Going to fix Jenny’s toilet on Sunday – replace a flapper, I think – and will probably start organizing things tomorrow for my trip next week. Will probably also go somewhere tomorrow afternoon to watch some football, play trivia, and hoist a few. At some point, I need to buy toilet paper and clean my master bath.

Call it the weekend of the toilet.

So I’ll wrap this up now and call this experiment of nightly updates to my blog, using my phone as a monitor and a tiny Bluetooth keyboard as an input device, a rousing success. Had I known how much I could use the phone for if I attached it to a keyboard, I probably would’ve picked up the latter years ago. It will definitely come in handy on off-the-grid vacations in the future.

With that, I close this entry and prepare for sleep. I’ll pick up this tome next week!

Onward to Memphis

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Today’s featured image is of a deer bouncing away from me as I stand in the parking lot of my office in Alpharetta. Apparently, there is a small herd of the critters living in a rather cramped bit of forest in the middle of the office park, and they come out to graze or pee or people-watch or whatever just about every night when I’m getting ready to leave.

Speaking of leaving, I’ll be driving over to Memphis in a few hours to start a 5-day stint setting up a new client there.  I am somewhat nervous about this, as I’ll be the only person at the site.  It’s an offshoot of a Chattanooga firm, and everyone else on this project (5 people, I think) are going to the Chatty office.  My concern is that, while I’m not overly worried about the technical aspects of the job, I’m not entirely sure about the procedures that I’m supposed to be doing.  The X-company documents pretty much nothing.  You’re just supposed to pick it up from osmosis, I guess.  Problem is, I’ve only been on one other project, with one other person, and I really don’t know what’s expected.  Guess I’ll find out.

The plan is for me to start doing some off-site work (joining machines to the local domain, getting antivirus installed, etc.) tonight – from my hotel room – and then there will be a down day tomorrow, when I’ll go to the office, physically connect our server to the firewall, set up printers, patch the workstations that I can’t get to tonight, etc.  Then I’ll work with the users Tuesday-Thursday (including a training class on Tuesday, for which I have no documentation, though there is supposed to be a PowerPoint presentation somewhere) and hit the road for home after work on Thursday.  With the time change, I should get back to Atlanta sometime around midnight Thursday and will take Friday off.

After that, I’ll go BACK to Memphis on Sunday because – I really don’t get this – the office that I will set up this week will be relocating to a new office next week.  Why they didn’t just do everything on the same week is completely beyond me, but it’ll be a shorter week for me.  I’ll drive out Sunday, move our server and firewall to the new place on Monday, then hang out and help the users until Wednesday, when I’ll again come home.  Will take the following Thursday off.  Not sure about that Friday.  I’ll probably go to work because I know that I’ll have email and old tickets backed up beyond belief by then.

I was made the primary consultant for two more firms over the last couple weeks.  One in Baltimore, the other in St. Cloud, MN.  Both are problem children and the one in Minnesota is a particular beast.  Whoever set them up (from the X-company) did a terrible job, and the firm is paying the price.  Their email system was set up incorrectly.  A couple of vital software packages were only partially installed.  Worst of all, the client opted to go with “cloud only” support, which means that I don’t have remote access to their workstations.  So this company is opening probably 20 new tickets a day, most of them having to do with their email or the poorly-installed applications, and I pretty much have to say, “Yeah.  Our bad.  We’re working on it.”

Did I mention that the project manager who did that job (in St. Cloud) is the same guy who’s leading the effort for the firm in Chattanooga and Memphis?

So yeah.  I’m a bit nervous about these upcoming trips.

On the home front, Mary is indeed moving out later this week, though she says she’ll take care of the cats into the first week of December for me when I’m gone.  As I said in a previous post, I’m mentally taking back my house and I’m sort of excited about that.  Haven’t decided yet if I’ll get a new television, since I’m strongly considering putting the one in my bedroom into my redesigned office, for use as a large monitor.  If I do that, I think I’ll be more comfortable working from home once or twice a week.  I’ve not done that yet (the offer is on the table) because working on a single screen really sucks when you’re doing the kind of work that I do.

So if I do that, I’ll move the television that I put in Mary’s room (the office) into my bedroom, and then I’ll probably want to put one downstairs.  If I decide to do that, then I’ll probably want to get a decent-sized television with all the Roku stuff (streaming channels) built in.  So I’m window shopping.

Ironically, I’ve also decided to basically stop spending money, as I’ve decided that 55 would be a great age to shoot for for retirement.  I know, I know.  It’s too young and blah blah blah.  But the fact is that I’m tired of doing what I do.  I was happy – and well-paid – in my AT&T gig, and I’m miserable – and making half of my old salary – with the X-Company.  By 2021, I’ll have about a half-million in my 401k, about $120K in my AT&T pension (from which I’ll be able to draw around $800/month – I’ve checked); and, assuming I can sell the house, I should be able to buy a few acres in the woods and put up a hovel for cash.  I recently visited my friend who did exactly this over the last two years, and – while I’d find better land and put in a few more amenities (a wood stove for sure) – she’s got a pretty sweet setup.

So there it is.  It’s out there.  I aim to retire in 3 years.

In other news, Furman won a playoff game against Elon yesterday.  Very close game, and a bit of redemption from the 2nd game of the season, when Elon won a squeaker on a last-second field goal.  The reward for the win is that Furman will travel to Wofford next week for the second round.  In the 1st week of the season, Wofford beat Furman by 1 point by stopping Furman’s 2-point conversion attempt on the last play of the game.  Furman fans are calling these games, “The Revenge Tour.”

Not much else to talk about these days.  I get up before dawn, go to work, come home after dark, and go to bed.  Not depressed.  Not elated.  Just sort of bored.

Maybe Memphis will give me something to write about.

 

Catching Up

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I’ve spent a great deal of time this morning attempting to get the permissions set correctly on this WordPress site, and – so far – have had very little luck in doing so.  I did manage to get a plug-in installed to tell me what’s WRONG; Unfortunately, it has been unsuccessful at actually fixing those things.  Looks like I’ll be doing manual edits for a while.

I perused my latest entry and discovered that I haven’t written anything since going to Annapolis two weeks ago, so here’s a quick rundown on what’s gone on since then.

As mentioned, I spent the week of August 8th in Annapolis, MD, helping to set up a new client for the X Company.  It was pretty straightforward stuff – adding machines to the domain, setting up printers, installing the correct version of the Citrix receiver and antivirus on machines, and then spending a few days working with the people there and showing them how to navigate the cloud, finding fixes for individual problems, etc.  I would have enjoyed myself a lot more if some actual planning had gone into the project, rather than just a basic, “Here’s a domain controller. Knock yourself out,” approach.  The more I work at this company, the more I realize that they talk a really good game about project management, but they actually do very little of it.  If/when I’m ever able to find another gig – and if I get an exit interview – that will be the #1 thing I have to say.  They’re growing too fast, they don’t plan for more than the simplest changes, and it’s eventually going to bite them in the ass.

Maryland itself was fine, I guess.  I didn’t see much of it.  Contrary to the thoughts of a few of my friends, I was not on a vacation.  I was up by 5:30, in the office by 7:30, worked 11-12 hours a day, and returned to my hotel, where I normally ate microwave macaroni and cheese and either watched television or played “Medal of Honor” for an hour before going to bed.

I did go out to dinner one night with my co-worker, Nate.  We found a sushi place across the street from my hotel and gorged on it.  Blew through my entire per diem for that one meal, but it was worth it.  Besides, by eating Mac & Cheese every other night, I made a few hundred bucks on unspent per diem.

I had planned to drive back from MD on Friday morning, but the more I thought about it, the more attractive it became to leave on Thursday night.  I didn’t want to hit morning traffic in D.C.  I wanted to have an extra day to decompress at home before going back to work at the office.  And – seriously – I missed my cats.  So I left at about 7:30 Thursday night.

Had a fairly uneventful drive, although I discovered U.S. 360 West – got on it somewhere around Richmond and took it over to 29 South.  Very pretty drive, although I got confused at one point and ended up on an “ExpressPay” lane for about a half a mile.  Since I don’t have any type of transponder, I’m wondering when I’m going to get a bill for that, and how much that little goof is going to cost me.

I got home at around 5:30 Friday morning, slept for a good part of the day, mowed some lawns, and had a decent weekend before going back to the phones on Monday.

The GBB kicked off rehearsals on Tuesday, so that was a nice diversion.

While in MD, I requested and received paid time off for August 21 & 22 (which is today).  That being the case, I headed for the NC mountains on Saturday, August 19, with an eye towards catching the solar eclipse in both totality and relative seclusion.

As it turned out, there were about a billion other people who had the same idea, and so it was incredible luck that I got lost on the way to my original destination (Big Fat Gap) and ended up driving down an increasingly horrible road that ended at a lovely hunter’s shelter near Deep River Gap.  My friend Brett, who had planned to meet me at BFG, got concerned on Saturday afternoon because 1}BFG was incredibly crowded, and 2}I hadn’t shown up.  So he started randomly driving around the area and actually ended up finding me on the increasingly horrible road.

This is not the first time that we’ve managed to locate each other, without any type of communication, in 20 square miles or more of wilderness.  We started talking about it on Saturday night and determined that we’ve probably done the same thing – him finding me or vice versa – 5 or 6 times in the last 15 years.  It’s uncanny.

Anyway, the increasingly horrible road was a godsend, because we only saw 2 cars and 1 motorcycle at our shelter between Saturday afternoon and Monday afternoon.  People would see the road and just turn around.

I know this, because I damned near did the same thing.  Now that I know where the shelter is, though….gold.

On Monday morning, Brett said that he wanted to catch the eclipse somewhere along the Cherahola Skyway, but I was in no mood to fight with the crowds and the traffic (I’d heard that Huckleberry Knob – where we’d originally planned to hike up and see the thing – had been outfitted with dumpsters and porta-potties), so I stayed at the shelter and Brett left.  I’d been told that an old, closed, forestry road that continued up the mountain from my shelter eventually ended up at The Hangover, which is a beautiful spot in the Joyce Kilmer forest; so at around 1130, I started hiking up it.

After 3.5 to 4 miles – every motherlovin’ step of it UPHILL – the road-cum-footpath ended up at a clearing in the middle of absolutely nowhere.  By then, it was 1:15, and I decided to head back down and try to make it to my backup plan for the eclipse, which was a nice little hill on one side of the increasingly horrible road that would offer close to a 360-degree view.

While the hike down was much (MUCH) easier than the one going up, it still took a while, and when I found an open spot on the trail at around 2:00, I took out my eclipse glasses just to see if anything was happening.  Good thing I did, because the eclipse was well under way by then.

So I set up my tripod and camera (did I mention that I carried both of those things all the way up that trail?  Auuuuugggghhhh!!), and spend the next 40 minutes trying to get some shots.  I assume that I did.  I haven’t looked at my memory card yet.  I did, however, get a look – with my eyes – during the 2 minutes or so of totality.

Wow!  It really was cool to see the corona.  Very cool.

It was also a fascinating experience in less majestic ways.  Like, for instance, the way that it went from light to dark as if someone had flipped off a switch.  Or the way that the crickets were chirping and birds were singing their twilight songs in the middle of the afternoon.  Or the fact that the temperature dropped about 15 degrees in 60 seconds. Or that I could actually see a few stars.  I’ve seen (that I recall) two other solar eclipses – but never totality.

It was worth the trip, and the increasingly horrible road, and the 3-mile hike uphill to nowhere.

After the meat of it was over, I continued back down the trail to my car at the shelter, packed up, took one last drink of filtered stream water, and headed out.  Within 500 yards, I saw a truck approaching from down the increasingly horrible road, and pulled on to a turn-out to let it by.  It pulled up next to me, and I saw that it was occupied by a family of 5.  The driver, looking very concerned, asked me, “How much longer does this go on?”  I told him he was near the dead-end and that the worst was over, and the kids in the back started celebrating.

So at least one other family no knows the location of my new happy place.  Though, I don’t know if they’ll want to make the trip again.  When I said, “Truck,” earlier, I meant “Minivan-like vehicle.”  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had bottomed out at least four times to get as far as it got – and that part about “the worst being over” was a complete lie on my part.  The last 500 yards were the worst on the road.

But I’ll go back.  And I might even hike that stupid trail again, although my calves are SCREAMING at me this morning.

The NC mountains never fail to calm me.

Changes

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Today’s featured image is one of my desk at Digital Life one year ago today.  Ah, the innocence of rubber duckies, lightly-salted almonds, and not having a clue what was in store for me….

Or for Digital Life, for that matter.  I don’t think that, at least after the first year of my employment there, I ever made much of a secret of the fact that I thought upper management was taking a great idea at Digital Life and ruining it.  When I left Global Network Operations for the DL gig, I did so in large part because I thought I was getting in on the ground floor of a project that would actually make life better for a lot of people.  The buzzwords back then (2012?) were “Living In Place,” and I honestly believed that DL could change the way people live.

See, the big idea was home automation that could be monitored.  Monitored by oneself or by someone else.  So that, for instance, elderly parents could continue to live in their own home and their children or other designates could help to keep them safe.  Your 89-year-old mom leaves the iron turned on for 6 hours?  No problem – you can shut it off with your phone.  Fires, water leaks, gas leaks…all of those things that you want to know about would be detectable and actionable from anywhere in the world.  DL was literally almost called “Living in Place,” with the idea that you didn’t have to be at your home to run it.  You didn’t have to put the folks into assisted living.  You didn’t have to worry about your cats.  Nearly everything could be automated, and our platform was going to offer that automation and continually improve upon it.

Then the bigwigs got involved.  They saw that there was a very large portion of the American populace without home security systems.  They saw that ADT was making a truckload of money by playing to people’s fear.  And they decided that Digital Life was going offer some home automation, sure – but first and foremost, DL was going to be a home security system.  And not just ANY home security system, but one that was hopelessly understaffed, wildly overpriced, and pathetically devoid of anything approaching high quality or creativity.  Living in Place was secondary, as evidenced by the fact that new automation devices were not investigated or added to the list of supported devices.  Decent cameras.  Learning thermostats.  Third-party door locks.  Voice recognition modules.

You know….the kinds of things that Google is currently dominating the market with.

It was all about police, fire, and rescue.  Riding on the back of an antiquated system that was developed before digital switches.  Literally – software had to be developed to mimic physical switches so that cellular technology – which had damned near completely replaced landlines – would work.  And AT&T didn’t even take ownership of the software.  They farmed it out to a company that no one has ever heard of.

And for all of this mediocrity, they charged the customer significantly more than, say, ADT.

So I was among the first wave of DL employees to get the boot.  Got a text yesterday from the area manager of the call center that I supported.  He’s in the third wave.  Looking for a job now.  The call center will close on 4/28.  National sales will cease early this summer.  Digital Life, with all the promise it had, is or will be on the auction block.

And the sad part is that I doubt anyone will buy it.  That ship has sailed.  While AT&T dawdled and screwed around with home security, Google and a few others got serious about home automation and living in place.  And the little people – the middle managers and the front-line people who tried to make Digital Life a great thing, are now seen by other AT&T affiliates as (I quote the area manager) “bad meat.”  I experienced a bit of this myself, but thought maybe it was just me.  It wasn’t.  Those who are being laid off have virtually no chance of being picked up by other departments within AT&T.  A lot of long careers, like mine, are just going to end.

You can bet that the upper management people will not find themselves in that situation.

But back to my own life.  Just as I’d gotten used to getting up early, hitting the road, and beating the traffic in both directions, my hours got changed.  Rather than working from 7-3 with no lunch, I got put on a 9-6 shift.  Sure, I could make it 9-5 without a lunch; but honestly, what’s the point?  Beating the 6 o’clock traffic by leaving during the 5 o’clock traffic?  No difference.  My commute now – in both directions – sucks.

I’m also on the phone about 8 hours a day now.  The headset doesn’t come off.  I’m the secondary contact for one company and, as of yesterday, the primary for another.  I’m on the clock – and documenting it – just about every minute that I’m in the office.  There is no room for creativity and very little for curiosity.  A ticket is opened and my job is to close it as quickly and quietly as possible.

Yawn.  I’m still looking for/thinking about other things to do.

Had a crown fall out during the drive to work last week.  Naturally, right?  After my AT&T dental insurance is over and before my The X Company dental insurance kicks in.  And it was on Thursday morning, which meant that my dentist – who doesn’t work on Fridays – couldn’t see me until yesterday.  So I took an extra hour at lunch yesterday, went to said dentist, got the crown reattached, and paid $71 for the privilege.

Got back to the office and was handed my insurance card two hours later.  Figures, huh?

On the plus side, my dentist may call to have me fish some wiring in his house this weekend.  He recently got a new cable box, with HDMI only, and his house isn’t wired for it.   Guess what, Doc?  I make $150/hour for systems installation.

One good thing about the new hours, by the way, is that I can get decent walks in each morning.  Except for today, that is.  It’s raining pretty hard, and I’m just sitting in bed typing.  Or I was.  It’s 7:00 now, and I’ve got to hit the road pretty soon if I’m going to make it the 10 miles to the office by 9:00.

Laters, y’all!