I do not like being back in the office. To minimize my possible exposure to the Covid, I am isolated from the few people who also have to physically be present within these walls, but that's not really the issue. What has sent me into a tailspin this week is the frustration I'm feeling at this whole process that I have to physically be present for. I suppose it's at least partly my own fault, setting up what I see now was an entirely unrealistic expectation that somehow I'd be able to crank out 150 (now mysteriously increased to over 200) machines in one week and be back in the safety of my own home thereafter.
But alas, that was not meant to be. An entire day was wasted because none of the jacks in the lab were live. Makes it hard to talk to the server that's serving up the images to be laid down on the machines. While waiting, I went ahead and hooked up eight laptops to the switch and power strip—only to be informed once the jacks were live that I was now supposed to concentrate on getting the tablets out first. So everything had to be disconnected.
The image for the tablets had problems with the audio driver. Not insurmountable; I could always manually install it after the fact, but it was just one more roadblock that stood in the way of me getting back home. So I went ahead and prepped 10 tablets for our field workers, and as I was getting ready to provide the cellular info to our phone person…discovered these tablets had been ordered without any cellular capability. "Oh, we'll have to get with Emily to see if she has any cell-equipped tablets we can swap these out for."
So another day wasted. "Go ahead and start the laptops until we get the other tablets."
(It turns out that none of the tablets that were ordered came with cellular. Go figger.)
The laptop image was completely fucked. The guy who builds the images was fucking around with the image and uploading it to the server while I was downloading them. (Of course I didn't know this until the whole process hung and reached out to him to find out what the FUCK was going on.)
"Go ahead and start over. I made some changes to the audio drivers on both the laptops and the tablets."
The laptops ran through the install process…and then would hang when rebooting. Consistently.
Meanwhile there's all this pressure coming down from my supervisor wondering how soon they can start rolling these out. (Thankfully I'm not involved in that process.)
There seems to be a lot going on behind the scenes that I'm not privy to. As I wrote earlier, we've been without a department supervisor for a month now, and the woman who is reluctantly acting as "interim" supervisor is a micromanaging [fill in appropriate descriptive word of your choosing].
For the life of me, I do not understand the urgency at getting this equipment out. Everyone has been doing just fine with the machines main ITS gave out back in May, so I simply don't get why this has suddenly become a hair-on-fire emergency to get all the desktops swapped out with portable devices right now. It's not like there's going to be a cost savings on VPN licensing or anything.
So as of today I'm still dead in the water with the laptops. The audio driver issue with the tablets still hasn't been fully resolved, but a manual uninstall and reinstall seems to take care of it. I had been simply joining the machines to the domain and adding the various administrative accounts to the machine before handing them off to my colleagues, but after today's barely tolerable department meeting I said fuck it and decided to do it the right way, and went back to doing the "normal" amount of post-imaging work (installing specific applications, etc.) before passing them on. It slows the process down a bit, but at least I know they're going out the door with everything installed and working the way it should be. I'll not have us being accused of rushing crap out the door the way main ITS was back in May. (Things that still aren't working because they're locked down and they refuse to give us admin rights on the machines so we can—you know—actually fix their messes.)
My mood improved somewhat this afternoon when I finally accepted that conservatively, I was probably going to be going into the office for the next month at least, even though we are still on work-from-home orders until mid October. Of course with Governor Douchebag opening up the entire state again, who knows if I'll ever be working from home again.
