Thirty-Five Years

 

Yesterday I celebrated 35 years of working for the same company. On each five year anniversary we get a catalog and get to choose a gift. I did not need a watch, a giant wall clock, binoculars, a necklace or camping gear. That pretty much left this 7 piece Cuisinart set of stainless steel pots and pans.

I did not need it, but I figured it would be handy to have.

On impulse, I took a picture and sent it to my son and DIL. "Do you need pots and pans," I texted? "I got this set for free and I really don't need it."

My son's one word reply:

"Desperately."

WELL THAT SETTLES THAT! The kids will check them out when they are here next week (SQUEE!) and then I will ship them to the city of Angels as a Christmas present.

I love it when magic happens.

Mooooooo------- ve!

 

That's my cubicle up there, with the green panels surrounding it. I'm away from everybody else in the office, which works for me. The problem is the cubicle is about four and a half feet tall, which means everybody can look down into it from any spot. I've had people walk by and rap the top edge from one end to the other. We had an audit last week and one of the auditors took a "private" telephone conversation away from the small conference area (just visible to the left) and leaned up against my wall, leaned OVER it, actually, gesturing, talking. I stood up, walked in front of him and coughed loudly. He turned away, but didn't move away. I do AP/AR, it's kind of sensitive. This cubicle had no privacy whatsoever.

Friday morning the VP came over (leaning over the wall, of course) and said the company had purchased taller cubicles for me and my eventual accounting partner just behind me. Our maintenance guy needed to know when he could set it up. Translation: When could I move all my stuff OUT of my cubicle so he could dismantle it and build the new one. "Well I am off on Tuesday because I'm getting a new stove delivered...." OK, so it will be Tuesday. That means on Monday, before I leave, I had to move everything out.

My now empty cube.

 Well, I ALSO got a new printer on Friday, but the resident Geek wasn't there to install it, so he did that on Monday. Which disrupted my day more than once because there were little technical things I really needed (like being able to scan files to the network server). So my day got disrupted. But by the time I left I had moved my stuff to the other cube. (Which will be dismantled and rebuilt on Wednesday. Can you say Disruption?)

Here's most of my stuff in the extra cube.

OH! Remember I said I got a new printer? Guess where the old one ended up? Yeah, that's my desk at home. Looks kinda familiar, doesn't it. That's the company's laptop (closed) over there on the left. Which means I can work from home when needed.

This is handy, because...

Tuesday is the day the new stove arrives. So I've cleaned it out, and moved a lot of stuff on the counters so the install guys won't bump into anything.
 

I've also cleared out the stuff that usually lives under the sink because the dishwasher is getting replaced too. I expect plumbing will be done, so I am ready for that as well. (In theory...)

I will also move things out of the way on the path from the front door to the kitchen so the guys will have a clear path through the house.

It's gonna be a day.

Reality Bites

The big device with all the cables plugged into it is a 48 port switch.  All computers on a network "talk" to the server through a switch like this. This switch connects 48 computers or other network devices (like printers or scanners) to the server. Actually it's more complicated than that, but that's enough for now.

At 5:50 on Tuesday morning my cell phone rang. It was "the guys" who remotely support and manage the network at the company where I work. I was lying in bed, awake, but my alarm had not yet rung.

"Hi Lynne, how are you today?"

I laughed, "If you guys are calling me at not-quite-six in the morning, my day has just gone to hell, and I'm not even out of bed yet!"

Turns out several users out in the factory had no network connection. Problem was, SOME of them did, and SOME of them didn't. There's nothing harder to troubleshoot than something that is intermittent.

The folks at the far end of the factory connect to the network through two smaller switches hung up in the rafters of the building. It was clear that one of them wasn't working.  Except when I rode up the lift truck to look at them (about twenty feet above the factory floor) they were lit up and seemed to be working.

I went back out to the front office and since it was barely 8:30 AM, I went to the front to turn on the lights and was stopped by the VP of Manufacturing. "I can't get on the network" he told me.

WELL! That meant my problem was not one of the small switches out in the factory, but hey, the users who complained were all out there when I arrived at 7 AM, so I had to start there.

As soon as I opened the door to the server room, I could see one switch that didn't have any lights blinking. Obviously that was the source of the trouble. I called "the guys" and while I was talking I unplugged the switch and plugged it back in, hoping to jump start it. Nope. So I unplugged it again and tried another UPS (uninterruptible power supply) because sometimes outlets die, and we had had a ton of rain the day before that leaked into the first aid room next door. The switch came to life, lighting up like a Christmas tree, and then running through a series of tests where the lights blinked on every port.

AND THEN I HEARD A BIG BANG AND SMELLED ELECTRICAL BURNING.  OH CRAP!

I yanked out the cord and made sure nothing was on fire.

By the time I reached the phone to tell "the guy" at the other end of the line that the switch was well and truly dead and we needed a replacement ASAP two of my colleagues were standing at the door asking if I was OK. Apparently I either squeaked or screamed. I was certainly shaking.

So that was how my day started. A little while later one of "the guys" showed up in person and we painstakingly identified connections that weren't working and moved those cables to other switches, thus bringing everything important back on line. We knew we'd miss some (like the 3-D printer, but we fixed that the next day) but by and large everybody was working, the UPS computer was up so we could ship product, the computer that connected the two CNC machines was working so that computer could transmit jobs to the CNC machines (thus keeping production going. Being "dead in the water" is a real risk, an EXTREMELY big deal, and should be avoided at all costs), and the guys in the stockroom could pull raw materials to fill shop orders, and receive orders into the system, bar code labels could be printed and the big laser printer out there could print.

Later as a colleague and I reviewed the quotes for a new switch, and as we debated getting one or two (since we'd had planned to replace the one that died and one other eventually, but not quite yet) he mentioned that the other big switch was almost 10 years old and the estimated life cycle of a switch is 10 years. "Then we should replace both of them" I said, "because if the other one goes, then everything in the front office goes down with it - sales, engineering, purchasing, accounting, HR and payroll."

He stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes widening.

"OK, so we replace both of them."

So that's the next trick.

In case you all wondered what I did in my day job.  Trust me, figuring out how to put a quilt together is a hell of a lot less stressful.

Reality Bites

Many of you know that I make my living as a Geek, watching over the computer network of a $11M privately held manufacturing company, and that I've been there over 27 years. While I no longer do all the "heavy lifting" I still oversee a lot.

Just before I visited Maryland in June, one of our network switches (which connected 24 users to the network) started working only intermittently. I placed an order for a new one and scheduled the installation. (Do you want to wait until after you get back from vacation, they asked me. HELL NO! I replied.) Alas, hardware works until it doesn't and it died for good two days after I left. It turned out to drag down other things with it, with the result that it was a holy hell week at the company. Bless them, they never called me and I never knew until I got back how bad it had been. Of course, there was nothing I could have done about it anyway...

I had been distracted by the virtual servers running out of memory. The servers (we have three physical servers) are set up so that if one dies, another can take over the tasks. Unfortunately if the servers are running at more than 50+ % capacity, it means another server CAN'T take over because you can't max out the memory without crashing.  So I had to make sure to replace the RAM on all three servers. RAM memory is cheap, but server RAM is not. If one server failed, and another couldn't fill the gap, then the company's computer network would be "dead in the water."  So I was focused on that.

About the same time we were looking at the age of all our equipment and realized our Firewall (the barrier of protection between our network and The Bad Guys) was beyond End Of Life. So we were working on getting quotes and ordering that. None of this is easy. It's not like buying a computer and just setting it up. There were hours of configuration our techs had to do to set it up before they brought it over for installation yesterday.

IN THEORY... it was a straightforward swap. Install the new firewall into the rack, disconnect the old one, connect the new one and test. Internet activity worked great. External email, not so much. After much tinkering it looked OK at 7 PM and I went home.

About an hour later, a text from the CEO arrived. "Can't get mail on my phone." Sigh.  So I tested and sure enough, that wasn't working. I called "the guys" and they worked on it. It took them till 11 PM to figure it out.  It's fine now.

Yet another thing to keep me away from the sewing studio, darn it.

I have a favorite quote about being a Geek:

"In Theory, theory and practice are the same. In Practice, they are not."

Sure do hope there are no other surprises lurking...

All Lined Up

So knowing my penchant for avoiding tradition at all costs, who among you would have predicted that I would end up liking this arrangement, with everything lined up. Well, more or less lined up.

Still though, the goal is to attract attention to these and to entice customers to sign up for a class to learn how to make them.

The layout yesterday was confused. This is a lot more straightforward, but it is by no means final. I am happy with only one butterfly (I'll let you guess which one), and I really like the crazy little heart that's bouncing higher than the rest. The asterisks are fine, but I have two two-toned ones that are so subtle you can hardly tell they are two-toned. (Oops). I like the birds, but I don't think these four work well together.

So I have some work to do, but that's OK. It's the kind of work I like to do. 

One note: "Free-piecing" is a technique of construction, not of design. Yogi Berra famously said "If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else."  Very true. Working improvisationally means you make it up as you go, but it doesn't mean you are stuck with it if you don't like the direction it's taking. You get to change course. You get to decide where you'll end up. 

I always start with some kind of plan or idea, and working this way helps me figure out what it is about the plan that works, and what doesn't. I love the zest, the verve, the unlikely results. I love the surprises I find along the way. If I planned every last detail out before I cut into a piece of fabric, it might be "perfect" but it could be stilted, boring, predictable, dull and worst of all "overworked."

Philippe Petit (he's the one who walked a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974) says the point of Art is to make it look effortless. "I practice very hard to make it look easy." 

Well, yes. I work very hard to make my work look completely spontaneous, fresh and lively. It isn't without effort, but it doesn't mean I don't like the work it takes to get there.




(btw, I remember Petit's famous walk when it happened. The DVD "Man on Wire", the story of the walk is awesome, thrilling and terrifying. He's still alive.)