Month: March 2023

Today was my first day back at work after being out all week with a particularly nasty bout of bronchitis. One of the joys of being married to an educator is the gifts they invariably bring home from the little walking bags of pus they call their students.

A trip to urgent care, an antihistamine that knocks me on my ass, and halfway through a z-pack later, I finally felt good enough to drag myself into the office today. One of my colleagues took a personal discretionary (i.e. mental health) day, and another is out (or at least working from home) for an unspecified length of time that may range as long as 4-6 weeks to care for his wife that had brain surgery last week. Good times!

My boss was naturally glad to hear that I was returning, because he had been hoping to take the afternoon off to spend some time with his son who is on spring break. And Elphaba gets very upset if there's no one in the office—even though everyone may be working.

I was greeted by 215 emails, 98% of which were totally irrelevent and quickly "marked as read." For better or worse, we are a good team, and when one or more of us is out, the others pitch in to keep the wheels of gub'mint turning.

But enough about that.

Warning: Geek Rant Ahead

As I mentioned earlier, I'm on a new liquid antihistamine that—while it does work quite well—is also prescribed as a sedative, a sleep-aid, and an anti-psychotic. I missed taking my first dose, but took one last night and its after-effects lingered all day. By mid afternoon I wanted nothing more than to go home and crawl into bed and nap.

Unfortunately, as my boss was leaving for the day he mentioned that a user was coming down at 4 pm to drop off her laptop for reimaging. It had some strange Office shit going on, and after all of us had looked at it and couldn't get it running correctly we decided to nuke it from orbit. "It's the only way to be sure."

"Since you leave at 4:30, just get the imaging started and let it run. I'll have Chris finish it up on Monday since you and I are both WFH then."

Of course the bitch shows up late—without the power brick. "Don't you have any spares?" she asked. "Not for that model, and it takes a very specific wattage."

I could almost hear her mutter "Fuck me" under her breath as she went back upstairs to retrieve the power brick. She returned several minutes later with her docking station and it's power brick (which has a barrel-type connector and not a USB-C). "Weren't you given a separate power brick to carry with you when you take this home?" "No, I just take the dock home with me."

Well, fuck me. These Dell 5570s require a special 130-watt brick, and while I had one, it was already in use imaging a different 5570. I told her thank you and said I would make it work.

She walked off and I interrupted the other image process and used the power supply on this machine. I recoiled when opening the lid; it was another one of those laptops that had obviously been used at home as an impromptu Hor d'oeuvres tray. Out came canned air and the Clorox wipes.

At this point it was nearly 4:30 and I knew I wouldn't be getting out of there any time soon. I plugged the rest of the connectors in and booted into the USB stick that would connect to the imaging server and start the process. I was inputting the required information and realized she hadn't left her password and I didn't know if she'd run the backup script that stores all her data and settings from the machine on her network share. So I backed out, rebooted, and logged in with my credentials to see if she had the script on her desktop; that would tell me she'd done it.

Simultaneously I texted my boss and asked if he'd backed her up when he was working on this and he said he had, but that he had to direct everything to her OneDrive because she didn't have a network share.

"Why does that set all my alarm bells off?" I asked.

"There's a copy of the backup folder on the c-drive as well," he said.

Yeah, but if I wipe and reimage the machine that will disappear as well.

So I went back to my own laptop and created a network share for this bitch (because that's where the restore script will pull from, not some nebulous place on her OneDrive) and physically copied the contents of that c-drive backup folder over to it.

It took nearly 30 minutes. Nearly 60 gigabytes worth of crap. Yeah, she's one of our engineers so she has every program under the sun installed—and because she had no network share, all that data was stored locally, but she is also one of these folks who seems to think her workstation is also her personal computer. Yeah, I saw lots of file names flash by during the transfer of things that should definitely not be on a work computer.

At around 5 pm the transfer was complete. I power cycled the computer and booted into the USB stick. About four steps in, I realized that I'd mistyped the computer name. This is something that could've been "fixed in post" as they say, but it was easier to do it then before the process started.

Except…while I could click on the clear-field button, now I wasn't able to type anything new into the name field. I thought that was odd, so I backed out to the previous step and tried again. Same thing happened. I powered down completely and powered the machine back up. I pressed F12 to get into the startup options menu to select the USB stick and…nothing. The machine booted into the previously installed O/S. After trying this several times, it wouldn't even get that far, giving me the message "Something went wrong," and gave me the dreaded blue screen. I rebooted again. Still no response from the keyboard.

Fuck. Me. The damn keyboard had died or fried—probably from one of the dozens of crumbs that I had removed.

By this point it was past 5:20 pm, and already physically spent, I said to hell with it and powered it down. Bitch ain't gonna get it back on Monday, that's for sure. I packed up, got the hell outta there and then hit 15 out of 18 stop lights red on the commute home. Because of course.