It's been six months since the Work From Home order came down at my place of employment. On Monday, however, I have to go back into the office for the next week or so. To be clear, this was no one's first choice.
Since we're now in a new fiscal year and the purse strings have loosened somewhat from what they were in March, the organization is doing the right thing in light of the current pandemic and issuing all its employees laptops. In my particular division, that amounts to approximately 150 pieces, all of which will need to have our standard software image applied prior to being deployed.
Normally this would not be a problem, but working from home presents a few challenges. Since I am the departmental imaging "guy" and want to absolutely limit possible exposure to COVID because I fall into a high risk group, my supervisor suggested that I image the machines at home. The logistical difficulty of doing this was not insurmountable, and I certainly felt comfortable taking on the task. Even imaging from USB sticks instead of over the wire I could realistically expect to get 25-30 machines prepped per day
That was all well and good, and I was actually feeling pretty excited about it because to be honest I'm getting pretty tired of just staring at a screen for 8 hours and doing precious little else.
Well, this plan was run by my supervisor's boss and she put the kibosh on it immediately. "Non imaged equipment cannot leave our facilities."
Well damn.
Enter plan B. My colleagues would clean up the lab (a closed room with its own door that had gone from being an actual computer lab to one very messy store room) and I would come into the office starting Monday for the next five days to do the imaging work in house. I'm not exactly thrilled with the prospect because I'm still very skittish about being out in public, but my organization has gone to great lengths to follow CDC recommendations in terms of social distancing, mask wearing, and hand washing, so it's not going to be like say, spending an entire day at Target. My supervisor told me that for the duration of this project I wouldn't be working any additional tickets (so no face-to-face interaction with our customers) and he felt that by keeping me in isolation in the lab this would further minimize my overall exposure.
Okay, fine.
Ben and I both went to get swabbed today. This was not prompted by my (or increasingly likely his) return to work next week, but rather an unfortunate encounter Ben had last week. I'll spare you the gruesome details, but suffice to say that the selfish, callous disregard displayed by a certain individual (whose identity long-time readers of this blog will have no trouble discerning) who may have exposed us to the virus—after all the care we've gone through to follow the rules and avoid being exposed—has resulted many subsequent sleepless nights and that individual becoming unwelcome in this household ever again.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." ~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
I know it's not, but it reminds me a bit of North Baker Beach in San Francisco.
