Where's My Stuff?

This is the introduction to a new series called Where's my stuff? As I get older it gets harder and harder to find things and not just my keys or watch but also my things that were once easy to keep track of, like memories and marbles.

Admittedly part of the problem is that I am getting older and there are more memories to dig through in order to remember things so my searches take longer and longer. It's not just my old age, though that is Chapter 13 - Where's My Brain?, this series intends to prove there is a worldwide conspiracy to make things harder to find.

It used to be easy to keep track of stuff but now we can never find anything. Life is deliberately complicated with too much activity and too many distractions. Chapter 1: Where's my Stuff?

Telephones were once big and clunky and locked down on every street corner and on every kitchen wall but now the darn thing is ringing right there in front of us and we can't even find the little bugger in our purse or pocket. They are always ringing but never getting answered. Chapter 2: Where's the Phone?

The fast paced world makes it hard to keep track of traveling co-workers let alone the moving targets that are customers and contacts. We need a global clock to know who is gone to lunch at the various offices. Macroeconomics force the micro family to spread out in space and time and people can’t remember where to find their loved ones. Chapter 3: Where's my People?

Facebook and all the other semi-social tools for the internet only make it harder to find the actual people in our lives. How can we know what is safe to say, will the boss find out, which picture to show and who to befriend? Reality is such an easier game to play and not as many sand traps. Chapter 4: Where's my me?

Having multiple responsibilities at work means there is always a missing box. It could be from shipping and receiving or from storage or even from lost and found but there is always a missing box. The cubicle is a box and while it may not be missing you still have to find out which one contains the ever moving user. The server is a box that can't be found when the lab is constantly changing forests of racks full of units and not one with a label. Chapter 5: Where's the Box?

It used to be easy to go unplug the network cable to fix a bad box but now it would mean unplugging the entire rack enclosure which holds all the servers. When you travel you may think you are on the hotel network when you are really on the restaurant or worse yet some other guests wireless access point. Chapter 6: Where's the Network.

When there were 57 channels on TV we could still keep up but it takes 20 minutes to go through all the channels now, by then we fall asleep. Concerts are too expensive, movies are too numerous, and stage theaters are fading fast like the already extinct Drive-in. Chapter 7: Where's the show?

The last straw and the last chapter would be, Chapter Last: Where's My Job? Followed by, Chapter Infinity: Where's my Life?

IMO

It all started when I was 7 years old and I found a piece of solid metal in the shape of a house that became my favorite toy for the summer. Even though I soon lost it, none of my other toys were as good and that only made me miss my lost object all the more. I could never forget how good it felt in my hand and in my pocket and that was the beginning of my lifelong search for a collection of Interesting Metal Objects, aka: IMO.

That original IMO was not meant to be a house, it reminded me of a house, but it was probably just a piece of junk furniture or maybe a piece of machinery but it was the memory more than the actual item that stuck with me then and still today. I would try to get a copyright on the phrase ‘Interesting Metal Objects’ or the Anagram IMO, but they already got corrupted by the stupid internet when they came up with IMHO which now makes me look like someone who has no humble when it comes to “In My Humble Opinion”.

Working on the Railroad led me to a treasure trove of IMO and that was when I really came into the habit. Working along the tracks there were all the bits and pieces of broken bolts, bent spikes and chipped rails not to mention the multitude of stuff that falls off trains. The motherload of IMO came from the open top gondola cars that were overfull of scrap metal from all around the country. Sometimes I was lucky enough to climb aboard one of those gondolas when the trains were stopped and I was like a kid in a candy shop.

The Hi-Tech industry is also a bountiful source of interesting objects many of which are also metal. Building chip cubes is the latest craze, you need 6 of the same size and then figure how to glue them together without gluing your fingers all together but in the end it gets lots of positive comments from the passersby who can’t resist grabbing them from the shelf in my cube.

One of the primary collection methods for IMO’s is using the Take-Apart skill set. I was always good at taking things apart. But not so much when it comes to putting things back together again. To this day I will scour the flea markets and junk yards in search of potential sources. While other old men are famous for sitting around and whittling their time away I am always happy to spend a few hours taking apart old hard drives and such for a few magnets and other Interesting Metal Objects. Magnets are the ultimate interesting metal objects.

I have since expanded my collective interests to include interesting objects that are not metal, glass being my next favorite followed by wood and paper. There is no better glass collectible than marbles and I had accumulated an amazing collection at one time but then I lost all my good marbles somewhere along the way in life. I still have enough marbles to get by and am always on the lookout for more. In fact that is a whole other chapter in my Book of Me Series: Looking for My Lost Marbles.

The Server Is Down Again

When we first rolled out the Citrix Servers we had a few issues and there were a number of support calls that led to the creation of a generic category called Citrix Server Down. We then spent time and money to stabilize the farm and now the servers are very reliable with no outages for months and months, but it's too late, every problem that comes along gets thrown in the Citrix Server Down bucket.

Every morning the report comes in from our Bangalore office that the Citrix Server is Down Again. The twist is, their morning is our night so for me the calls come in between 8pm and 11pm with that same old complaint. These users are in various ODC's (Offshore Design Centers) which are basically branch offices off our branch office in India. These users have laptops and linux workstations that are maintained by a third party.

Here are the trouble report solutions for a typical series of tickets.

Day 1: Users can't even get to Google, obviously a network issue . Turns out all the local desktops were patched which broke their network software. The same thing happens on the Second Tuesday of each month with the latest Microsoft patch release.

Day 2: Some of the users cannot connect some of the time. I finally found a friendly user who admitted that it only happens when they use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. It is true that Firefox is faster in most cases but since it would not connect it wasn't really faster.

Day 3: Half the users can't connect half the time because they are trying to use “the other network” that they claim is faster. Ping and traceroute show they are not taking the right route. Turns out they are trying to use the unsecure network which is faster but also a security violation.

Day 4: No issues...Holiday in India.

Day 5: Many users cannot connect and all users have slow performance. As soon as I logon to one of their machines to investigate there is a big honking error message about a virus outbreak. I end up helping the Local Admin build a cleanup USB stick to pass around to all users.

Day 6: All users on one server are running slow. The CPU is maxed out at 100% due to a wreckless user running file sharing software. Kill the process but not the user.

Day7: One server locked up with all users frozen. There is a runaway process sending the memory past the limit. Their backup software is running at the wrong time due the time being off. Corrected the time and killed the backup.

In every case it was not the server at fault but I still had to fix it to prove it was their fault and not mine. After too many reports they formed an Action Team to meet every day with special reports to all the big shots in spite of my protests. That finally led to a meeting where they got the ODC Local Admin on the line and he sheepishly admitted that putting calls in the server down queue was the only way to get anything fixed. I will yell sooner next time…

Railroad Series – Chapter 9 : Fatalities

Over the 17 years I spent working on the railroad there were a number of fatalities at work but the first one is the most memorable. The poor victim was the System Crane Operator who was required to ride in his crane while in transport between Los Angeles and Portland. Normally the crane was attached to a slow moving Work Train but for long distances they would put the crane in the middle of a regular train. He was killed when an oversize boxcar hit the tunnel walls in the year 1973. The train only went about 100 feet before it ground to a halt but that was enough distance to cause a cave in on the crane and crushed the poor operator to death.

The process of clearing the cars and then rebuilding that last 100 feet of tunnel took almost a week to complete but the worst part was the first day when we faced the gruesome duty of removing the crane and the corpse. The tunnels just south of Ashland Oregon were not full size and there were sensors along the track before each tunnel that were meant to alert the train crew if an oversize car came through but in this case they just assumed it was the special crane car they were taking through and they ignored the warning signal.

In the post-Accident Investigation aka, Post Mortem it was found there were many chances to prevent this accident. The first question was why the oversize car was with the crane in the first place. The crane had been scheduled to go through Klamath Falls which has full sized tunnels but they made a last minute change that turned out to be fatal. If the crane had been locked down at the other end of the car it would have made all the difference. If the oversized car had been on the other end of the crane car. If the sensor alarm routine had been followed according to the rules. They changed a lot of the rules after that starting with no more operators riding in the crane. Each fatality brings a new change in the rules so it keeps getting safer but the fatalities have not stopped.

I never knew the name of that first guy but the second person to get killed was a welder named Marcel Chacon who died instantly by a runaway push car that rolled for 17 miles silently down the same hill near Ashland. The next fatality was a guy named Gonzalez who stepped in front of a passing train followed by a fellow named Mathews who fell off the end of the work train and then there was the gang truck roll-over that only had one fatality but injured all of the other 17 workers onboard.

There were so many accidents they had a Safety Meeting every morning before work where each employee had to sign a form saying they had read the Rule of the Day from the Book of Rules. After a fatality the Safety Meetings were a little more serious for a while at least. That is the subject of the next chapter in the Railroad Series: Safety Meetings.

New Year’s Resolutions

It’s good to make resolutions even if we don’t keep them. At least we care enough to try and then when we feel bad for not following through we are motivated to try harder or at least make more resolutions. If we didn’t feel guilty we wouldn’t have to make them in the first place. Back when we still smoked cigarettes we quit every New Year only to start again in a few days or a week at the most. Then in 2000 we finally did quit but it was in March and not related to a New Year promise. There is a good chance that all those false starts were good practice and helped reach the final success.

Every day we make a list of things to do yet we rarely finish, that is a miniature version of the annual resolution process. There is a list for the week ahead and another for this Month and even one for the next. All those lists are full of things that got rolled over from the previous list so it is standard procedure to not get everything done. The same thing that happens in our personal life shows up at work where we make promises that will not be fulfilled. Why do we play the game when we know it will never be finished? It must be fun for some unreason.

Two years ago I made a new year’s resolution to not make any more new year resolutions but I failed to keep it and accidentally made another one last year that I also failed to honor. So I figured if all resolutions fail anyway, then the real solution is to make a resolution not to keep any resolutions. So now if I fail, it will be OK and if I succeed that will be OK too. It's a guaranteed win\win even if I lose\lose.

Most resolutions are based on regrets from last year. Some resolutions are promises to stop doing something bad like smoking while other resolutions are promises to start doing something good like losing weight but if they were such good Ideas why would we wait and only want to do it once a year? We say we are making a promise for the next year but what we really want to do is erase the past so we can feel good again. Instead we should erase the future so we won’t keep repeating mistakes like making resolutions that can’t be kept.