The Perfect Day

My day yesterday started out like any other Monday, sucky.  I battled through the morning traffic on my way to work, I took the Martin Luther King bridge, because its a lot faster to go through downtown St. Louis, then to take the highway.  I got to work around the normal time, between 7:15 & 7:30.  As usual, I started to plan out my day, looked through my remedy tickets, checked my email, you know the normal stuff.  Around 10:00 I met up with one of my Co-workers, Eric, at one of the dorms on campus.  In order to upgrade the image on five of the oldest machines we have, we needed to bring the machines back to our office.  Generally, we image on site for these types of things, but computers in the dorms are firewalled, and its a huge pain to work through those issues with networking. 

When we goot there, we had to cut off the old locks.  The biggest problem I’ve had since I started working for SLU, is the lack of documentation.  How do you not document what you set the locks in a computer lab to?  So we cut the locks, but that was really just the beginning of our problems.  Each machine had two screws which held the base down to the desk, they also had whats called a tough nut, that bolts the computer to the table.  Tough nuts are very hard to get off, and in addition, they had glued the nuts in place on the bolts.  The machines were almost impossible to remove.  In fact, we actually thought about finding a truck, and just taking the whole table (that would have been a lot easier).  I’m not going to go into details, but it took about 4 hours to get these five machines out of the lab.  This was the highlight of my day.

So I carted the machines back over to my car; at SLU we don’t have a university vehicle, so we have to use our own cars everytime we need to transport stuff, or go check on remedy tickets.  So now its starting to rain.  This really sucks, because these are little small form factor machines, from before dell standardized them.  They have all of these little holes in them for ventilation, so I can’t take them out of my car, and back to the office, because its a little bit of a walk from the parking garage to the building.  It was about 2pm, and I decided, well, I guess I can eat lunch now.  Eating lunch at 2pm sucks, especially on a Monday.  Mmm macaroni and cheese, you know our building is still on a water boil from last week when the water main broke outside our building. 

 My day progressed from there rather slowly, remedy tickets, worked on a machine that I can’t zen because its got some fucked up hardware, you know, the usual.  It was around 6:15pm I decided to call it a day, gatherd my stuff together, and walked out the door.  I got in my car, and started home as usual.  Generally, I take the Eads bridge home, again there is less traffic if I go through the city.  I really wish now that I had taken the highway.  I got to the intersection of Compton & Locust, a four way stop.  I pulled up to the intersection and stoped there was another car about 10-20 feet pulling up to the intersection on the right, some cars farther down coming toward me.  I started moving again, and got about half way through that intersection, when I realized that car that was coming from the right wasn’t going to stop.  I hit my brakes, I was afraid that if he hit the back rear of my car, I would spin into the oncoming traffic.  He hit right in the middle of the passenger side.  I guess its a good thing there was no one sitting there.  We were both ok, the other driver and I, all I have is a dark purple bruize from the seat belt.  The entire passenger side of my car is fucked up.  The entire door is smashed in, there is no glass, and both the front and rear panels on the passenger side will need to be replaced.  Pictures to follow.