Monday, May 02, 2005

Telecommuting: How to work 16 hours a day...

and like it. Maybe. I guess it depends on the work. Today I was managing the manufacturing line via remote control -- I have that thing so automated that I can see when the workers sneeze (well, almost!) -- and managed my way through two shifts of workers. Ah, the virtues of automation! Especially automation that requires *ME* to tell it to let the worker do something stupid such as ship a few boxes that we *know* are busted (but we have to ship them to the hardware engineers so they can figure out WHY it's busted). Anyhow, I was bug whacking and figuring out what that flakey hardware was doing all the way from morning until just a few minutes ago.

Other techno-geekery: My toner cartridge came in for my Samsung ML6060 laser printer, and now it prints right again! Guess that'll get me a couple years more printing out of the old darling... also, my Epson C84 ink jet printer unclogged nicely once I finished meticulously taking cotton swabs and alcohol to every ink-laden portion of the piece of ****. So I have gone from having no printers working to having two printers working... ah... life is good!

As for why I'm at home rather than at the office -- I went waddling with a backpack in the wilderness over the weekend, and wound up wearing a hole in my left flipper, the one that is circulation-impaired. This requires meticulous wound care in order to prevent it from becoming infected and costing me more (or all) of the foot. That specific piece of footwear that wore the hole in my left foot is now officially retired, I have footwear that actually works for my feet nowdays so I'm going back to those boots, even though they're rather stuffy for hot weather.

And sooner or later, I'm going to have to get the MandrakeMandriva 10.2 Linux burned onto CD's and installed here on my laptop... but I've just been too darned busy. Sigh.

Anyhow, now you know why you got second-hand snark today (courtesy of SKB) rather than fresh penguin snark. Now I'm going to bed, tomorrow looks like a long day too, I get to go back to programming rather than playing manufacturing geek I hope! - Badtux the Techno-geek Penguin

4 comments:

  1. too cool.

    when skippy had a job he was able to get it down to just a few hours a day in the office, and a lot of it done at home.

    but, with the exception of no income, not having a job beats having a job, whether or not you're at home or the office!

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  2. Personally I think that I need to have a job. I need purposeful activity. And I hate housework, yardwork... anything I would be expected to do if I wasn't working. Independently wealthy would be nice, but I would still be working. I have some books I need to write, and I want to start some businesses, and.... I'm such a geek.

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  3. Well, I just finished another long day dealing with flakey hardware, unresponsive management, assembly line workers for whom English is a THIRD language... tomorrow morning I get to write another status report. Oh joy. Anyhow, didn't get a chance to blog any today, so now you know why there was no new snark today :-(. Sorry!

    - Badtux the Busy Penguin

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  4. Actually, uhm, Tannish, I have a confession to make... I enjoy what I do at work. Now, I hope we IPO and my stock options are worth jillions of dollars, but look, that's hardly the reason why, at 11pm last night, I was scanning the assembly line one last time looking for problems and figuring out ways to make things go more smoothly for our next production run. It's *fun* to problem solve that way. Now, if I had to actually go down there and screw together the damned things, I'd go crazy quickly!

    And no, I'm not a manufacturing engineer, I just wrote the software that automates various processes, and thus ended up entangled in the process... but what the hey, it's a living, it pays the bills, and I enjoy it, so...

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