The 4U Sun StorEDGE may or may not be working; it's definitely not going to go back into a rack any time soon. The fuckwit movers dropped it. The rackmount panels are replaceable but I can't switch the thing on until I've had time to look inside, so that's our Sun storage out until next week at the earliest.

I got my workstations rebuilt and running, ripping out the damned CapLock key from fresh, clean keyboards (on which I have to write 40 or so macro reminders above the Fnn keys). A mail check showed me most of my tickets had been updated and the customers were screaming like hungry seals for my fishy responses.

There was another mail, much more ominous...

I was always against the total consolidation of the main lab machines, not just because I loved having all that hardware close-by (and we were more flexible as a result), but because there are too many points of failure with centralised machines. Like telecomms. Or power. Our UK center has lost comms a few times and -- despite dual independent feeds -- electricity not once but twice. But it gets worse.

Over the weekend there was a fire. In the datacenter.

The worst is yet to come.

I no longer even have a cube. I sit at a big, wide, deep desk, the back half of which is unusable. The general office layout is still cube-like, but I no longer have any walls on which to precariously balance and stack reams of paper and shield me from the other monkeys.

At least I got to keep my red stapler19" CRT set to 1600x1200 only because the crappy Compaq on-board video can't handle more. I may yet buy a graphic card for this machine. Any recommendations on cheap cards for non-gaming environments which do ultra-high resolution at high frequency would be appreciated. Everyone else was forced to trade in the CRT for a 19" HP L1940T LCD which can only do 1280x1024 despite having a physically larger screen. I need my real estate; it's good to be buddies with IT.

So I sit here at $MegaCorp waiting for the overlords to sort out the problems they're having getting me into the system. The system chokes on my name. I see many benefits to this: I'm free to take care of all my other unpacking/reconnecting and all my other cow-orkers are figuring out the hard way which system changes are actually necessary. This will become common knowledge once it comes time for me to switch over my own boxes.

I closed another very bloggable ticket today; it should be up next week. I've already started work on the new my-head-shaped-dent, but I miss the form-fitting comfort of the old one which was almost deep enough to prepare a bag of ramen in.