Of Pens and Swords

Last week, damn, it was busy. First, let me stress the importance of testing patches before you deploy them to hundreds, if not thousands, of workstations. I have a relatively small site, 60 machines or so, 100 people, give or take. But when two patches screw up all my machines, and worse, patches pushed down, in the middle of the workday, forcing people to reboot w/o saving any information they may be working on, then seriously degrading the usability of the machine once it starts, that’s when I get a little annoyed. Anyways, last week was very fun…

More fun this week. Shannon, the truck, is in the shop today to be troubleshot, and maybe fixed. It sucks actually having to take my truck to the shop, I always do the work on her when I can. She’s only been in the shop one other time, and that’s because I wasn’t in the country to fix the problems. She’s a good truck though, and I have no illusions about getting rid of her anytime soon. Even when it comes time to replace the pac in the truck, it’ll still be a lot more cost effective than replacing the truck. She’s 8 now, has about 120k miles on the frame and engine, and she still starts on the first crank.
I am looking at getting another truck, or car, sometime in the future though. I have to get Jessica her new car, or van, first. Her’s is the priority, since she has a 94 w/ 120k on it. Her van is just beat up and showing it’s age. I’m looking at getting a diesel though. It won’t be a replacement to my truck, but may be more of a daily driver, considering what fuel costs are looking to be. A diesel because they typically get a lot better fuel mileage, and also because there is a relatively inexpensive method of running the vehicle off of vegetable oil. They’re known as Grease cars typically, and well, if I can drive a vehicle on about 2 gallons of diesel/month and a few hours of work a month to filter out the oil, so be it. Leave it to me to tinker with something :) This again is a long term project.

Human after all – that was the saying last week. I studied (apparently not enough) for one of my certification tests, and failed by a question. So damn close…but, I know where to focus more, and will get it next time. Hopefully, that’ll be in another two weeks or so. The day itself was hectic and annoying, and that probably didn’t help my overall composure. Shannon was running like uber-crap all of a sudden, slow traffic, an accident at the key intersection that I was supposed to turn at, drivers on the road here driving erratically for really unknown reasons (just being themselves I’m figuring)…so to get 15 miles away, took me an hour. So much for trying to be early and get composed. I got there in the nick of time and all flustered. Yee haw. It sure didn’t help that a full 1/3 of the questions I had not studied nor did I know exactly what it was asking. I have a pretty good idea of what it should have been, but testing is the hard part…knowing the answer to the question it’s asking, not the real world answer that you should give. I know that doesn’t make sense….more or less, you study to pass the test, not to pass real life.
Next, after the test, was coming to the conclusion that I have to take the truck in. She runs awfully if she wants to. I’m sure there is more of a real reason, but I can’t seem to find it. Overall, it would still cost me quite a bit to fix it myself, since I don’t have half the tools required. I’m not into investing $500 + into tools I may use one or two more times in my life. That, and I have no experience in fuel injection, so there is the problem that I may make the situation worse. It’s a gamble that I can’t afford to take in both time and money.
The updates pushed to my computers last week have me more than annoyed. It caused me to work entirely too much to fix a problem that could have been fixed by testing out the patches in a static environment, like they’re supposed to be. Job security, eh?
I had the big-wigs from the government agency I contract for here, as well as the regional boss from the company I contract through, and the airport engineers, yada yada yada. I’ve done this now for 3 airports, and it doesn’t seem that big of a deal to me anymore. The Government guys were at least easy to get along with, a little quarky, but hey, they’re geeks as well. Just highly paid geeks. (One day) That was by far the easiest part of my week though. Stressful, a little, but I’ve been preparing for those two days for two months now. Easy.

The biggest issue on the table right now is with my company. Seems the wording of an email last week seemed to allude the the possibility of about 45 of us lonely airport geeks being out of work. I have to be a little cautious in my wording here, be as specific as most of you have known me to be. The deal is, my company is subcontracting through another company for this portion of the contract. The overall contract is huge, we’re talking probably billions of dollars. My company holds a very small, but very important stake in that contract. Seems the big company started looking for another small company to take the place of my company. This has to do with government requirements for what they hold as a Small, Minority owned business. No big deal, all that would have happened is that I would have been paid by another company, done the same job, so forth. The issue today, however, is that the small business picked to do this job is owned by the same guy that was formerly the president of my present company, and something with a non-compete agreement, yada yada yada. Long, drawn out story (pissing contest). Anyways, the wording on the table right now is that even though our company is destined to lose contract, the other company will not have the right to contact us (the current employees) nor can they hire us. Hmm…
This also goes against what they (my company) told us 2 weeks ago, that they would not pursue us (the employees) in legal matters dealing with a non-compete agreement that we have with the company, saying that it would be in their best interest to at least hand us off to the new company, having no loss in service to the government agency, the major contract holder, or ourselves, being that we’re the ones trying to provide food for our families, so forth.

Overall, a lot of us feel like the gold-fish in the toilet. We’re not dead, we are getting pissed on, and well, we’re only a handle twist away from being flushed. I don’t like getting pissed on.

Just got a call back from the dealership about Shannon. She’s doing ok, another bad O2 sensor (just frackin replaced those), a leaking intake manifold, a bad catalytic converter, and fowled injectors. I’m getting it all taken care of, minus the catalytic converter. That’s expensive. Overall, it’s going to cost a little under a grand. I’m not happy about that, but it’s cheaper than what I thought it could be. The intake alone is a problem that’s been weighing on my mind lately…

Hopefully, she’ll run better.

I have work to do, spent entirely too much time writing about a life that very few want to read about.