This week I have been selected to help with a retail project, upgrading a number of stores to Windows XP. While I know it seems almost outdated as all new computers are coming with Vista, it seems to be the norm. Most companies I have worked for have a standard Windows 2000 image.
This isn’t a bad thing. Windows 2000 works fine for most business applications, especially if the company in question has proprietary software designed for 2000. So if it works, there’s no reason to pay for a new OS and then pay more to have people install it.
I’ve been waking up at 4:30am to be out on the road by 5:00am to get to work at 6:00am. It has always been difficult for me to wake up while it’s still dark out. My body refuses to acknowledge that I actually want to get up and move around while there’s still perfectly good sleeping hours left.
I even arrive at work while it’s still dark, having to use my security card to enter the building and activate the elevators. I arrive in my office in time to see the first rays of the sun peek over the distant horizon, just north of downtown, so even from thirty miles away, the skyscrapers are clearly visable in stark silhouette.
We gather up our things and leave. About a block away, I realize that I forgot a can of air, which is sitting right there on my desk where I thought I wouldn’t forget it. So I run back into the building and back onto the elevator. Its about 7:00 now and I’m in an elevator full of people. I impatiently wait for the elevator to get to the eleventh floor, already running a few minutes behind schedule. Ninth floor, it opens and some people get off. Tenth floor, eleventh floor, and nothing happens. The doors sit there, the ‘11′ in red lights mocking me. I hit the ‘Door Open’ button with no response. The elevator is broken again.
Great.
After a long moment, the doors open, except it’s not the eleventh floor before me, its the tenth. The light still says ‘11′. Great, the elevator lost count of the floors. The doors close and it goes to the twelfth floor, where the rest of the people were going to get off. Luckily for me, it thinks the eleventh floor is the twelfth floor, so I can get off. Unfortunately, the workers from the twelfth floor (call center), don’t have security access to the other floors, and have to take the stairs.
I run to my desk, grab the air, and run back to the elevators. I summon an elevator and I hear *ding* on the floor below me. I press again, and again the elevator opens on the floor below me. Great. I then run down eleven flights of stairs, because I was already running late enough.
And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if I went to the fourteenth (top) floor. Would is crash through the ceiling? Go to the first floor? Who knows.
Anyhow, glad to no longer be working the early shift. Even though it was nice to be home by 4:30, with enough time to catch the elote street vendor.
Zel-kun out.
Post a Comment